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| My Best Friend Joe | |||||||
| Our columnist goes for coffee with the java-junkies behind ‘The Caffeine Advantage’ | |||||||
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| Oct. 15 — Hello, my name is Gersh and I’m a drug addict. And apparently, it’s the best thing that ever happened to me. |
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| THE DRUG, OF COURSE, is caffeine. And, according to a new book that I read one night last week when I couldn’t sleep because I’ve been drinking too much coffee, caffeine is making me smarter, wittier, thinner, more productive, more fun at parties and (appearances to the contrary notwithstanding) sexier. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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“Caffeine is a safe, almost magical tool for releasing our hidden potential,” according to “The Caffeine Advantage,” a new book/rationalization by noted coffeeholics Bennett Alan Weinberg and Bonnie Bealer. The authors claim that caffeine allows us to “achieve whatever it is we want to achieve” and “gives us the extra time we need to accomplish” it. It suppresses our appetites, makes us more alert, heightens our senses, and even gives us more manual dexterity (it must be true; I typed that last sentence in seven-tenths of a second). “Caffeine,” Weinberg and Bealer conclude, “is an old friend who, it turns out, can do a great deal to help you lead a happier, healthier, more-productive life.” (After reading that line, I quietly began re-evaluating all the friendships in my life—and, to be honest, found them wholly unsatisfying compared to my torrid affair with coffee.) So you can imagine how excited I was to hear about “The Caffeine Advantage.” No longer would I have to feel guilty about my increasing consumption of coffee (how much coffee have I been drinking lately? Well, let’s put it this way: If I was a country, I’d be just behind Russia on the list of world’s top coffee consumers. Let’s put it another way: I’m drinking so much coffee lately that some mornings, I wake up in a fetal position outside of a Starbucks on the bad side of town with biscotti crumbs stuck to my beard.) But even though “The Caffeine Advantage” was willing to let me—and other java junkies like me—off the hook, I still felt bad about my ongoing substance abuse. |
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Don’t get me wrong, it’s not the addiction that bothers me (hey, everyone needs a hobby). Instead, what’s troubling me is the increasing suspicion that every single creative success I’ve had over the past year—from my award-winning coverage of the Nabisco Mallomar on this Web site to my Earth-shaking, ground-breaking, mind-blowing expose on the scam of “iced coffee” in my New York Post column—was the caffeine’s doing, not mine. I mean, remember that column I wrote a few weeks ago about the bald candidate who got thrashed in the Massachusetts gubernatorial primary? I was higher than a kite on Colombian Supremo when I wrote that hilarious line about Giuliani’s combover. And that column where I whimsically remarked that Modern Pentathlon is quickly becoming our national pastime? I was so strung out on Ethiopian Yrgacheffe that I couldn’t have differentiated between the shooting and the riding competitions. Lately, I’ve begun to realize that before I became Java Man such insightful, witty repartee was completely beyond my abilities. And bons mots? I don’t think I even had un bon mot. But now, thanks to caffeine, I have beaucoups de bons mots—and I find I can even shift between French and English with the agility of Coffee, er, Kofi Annan. And here was this book telling me that coffee could make me a better lover in the bedroom and, more important to my wife, more creative in my office. I had to meet Weinberg and Bealer—over coffee, of course—to find out whether I was a hack or a gifted writer who just happened to have coffee for an editor. I first told them that I felt I was cheating by turbo-charging my workday with the demon drug. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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“The word ‘cheating’ means taking something that isn’t yours,” Weinberg said. “How is it cheating to take a harmless substance that lets you function more efficiently and more creatively?” I tried again, arguing that it didn’t feel right that my brain could produce such gifted prose when awash in the world’s most popular drug yet produce little more than a shopping list whenever I skipped my morning cup o’ joe. “Remember,” Weinberg said, “the caffeine doesn’t give you the brain cells, it just makes them work better. Anything you write, whether you wrote it on caffeine or not, still came from your mind—unless you’re plagiarizing, of course.” (Damn, the man is onto me.) Weinberg reminded me that some of the most creative people in history have been coffeeheads. Legendary writer Honore de Balzac said that when he drank coffee, “ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop, the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination’s orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink—for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water.” He must have been a serious addict. I find that no matter how strong I make my brew, I only get a few horses of metaphors rather than an entire cavalry. Just to be sure I wasn’t being hoodwinked by a couple of strung-out caffeine addicts, I called a guy named Stephen Cherniske, whose book “Caffeine Blues” tries to debunk many of the pro-caffeine studies cited by Weinberg and Bealer. Now, perhaps my morning half-gallon of Indonesian Moka Java had made me over-aggressive, but I went after Cherniske and quickly got him to admit that he—the man who wants to decaffeinate America—drinks a really large mug of coffee three times a week. “It gives me a nice, comforting lift,” he said. Cherniske kept talking for another hour, but after his stunning admission, I put the phone down and got myself a refill (don’t tell him). But Cherniske did have one good argument. As Weinberg and Bealer point out in the book, 100 milligrams of caffeine—which is the equivalent of a mere four ounces of filtered coffee—is more than enough for most people to experience the mood-improving benefits of caffeine. |
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That’s when Weinberg told me about something called the Yerkes-Dodson Biphasic Curve, which, in layman’s terms, is shaped like an inverted “u.” The curve basically shows that a little caffeine gives you a little jolt, more caffeine gives you more jolt, but even more caffeine gives you less jolt. (And Jolt Cola just gives you rotten teeth.) But the authors assured me that with a little experimentation, you can quickly find the dose of caffeine that’s right for you. Which means that from now on, I am going to take my coffee “experimentation” as a legitimate business expense. Just like Balzac. Gersh Kuntzman is also a columnist for The New York Post. His Web site is http://www.gersh.tv © 2002 Newsweek, Inc. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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