Transcription of Murray Carpenter for the show Caffeinated #184
Dr. L Belisle: This is Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to Love Maine Radio show number one eighty-four, Caffeinated airing for the first time on Sunday March 22, 2015. Mainers love their coffee and why not? We have a diversity of roasters creating distinctive blends within our state and many unique coffee houses within which we might enjoy our cup of Joe. Today, we speak with Maine author Murray Carpenter about his book Caffeinated: How Our Daily Habit Helps, Hurts, and Hooks Us and Bard Coffee manager and long-time barista Brittany Feltovic. You’ll hear some interesting insights about our favorite bean. Thank you for joining us.
People who know me well know that I am largely a tea drinker although I do have a weakness for espresso in some cases. Today, we’re going to speak with somebody about why that might be. In fact, I actually know it’s the caffeine in it and so does Murray Carpenter. He is a journalist and author. His book Caffeinated was published by Hudson Press in 2014. He has a Master’s in Environmental Studies and two grown children. He lives with his wife in Belfast. You know all about this caffeine thing don’t you?
Murray: I know a far amount about caffeine now, yeah.
Dr. L Belisle: Yeah, this was a great book. I really enjoyed reading it. It’s Caffeinated: How Our Daily Habit Helps, Hurts, and Hooks Us and you really went through some things that I didn’t, had put no thought to whatsoever.
Murray: Well good. Yeah, it’s I think a lot of people find that their daily habit is a little more interesting when they get to know it a little more intimately I would say.
Dr. L Belisle: Tell me why it was that this became something that you had an interest in?
Murray: Well this project really has its genesis thirty years ago when I was an undergraduate studying psychology at the University of Colorado. I was at that point what the researchers, the caffeine researchers would call caffeine naïve which is coffee wasn’t a part of my life and between the house I lived in with my friends off campus and the library there was a great coffee shop. This was in the early years of the gourmet coffee boom. It was a coffee shop bookstore and we used to hang out there and drink coffee on our way to school. I noticed because I was caffeine naïve maybe I noticed more than most people how a couple of cups of coffee would really help me to focus for studying and it would help me to take on a big writing project.
I didn’t take it for granted and ended up senior year writing a paper for a senior psychology seminar about caffeine and cognition. I’ve had this interest in the back of my mind for quite a while.
Dr. L Belisle: This adventure brought you really all over the world. You spent time down in Central America looking at where coffee came from. You attempted to go to a caffeine factory in China. I think you made it as far as the gates if I’m remembering correctly.
Murray: Yes, that’s right. Yeah, yeah.
Dr. L Belisle: You’ve spoken with experts here in the United States as well. Did you think that you were going to be on such a journey when you started this?
Murray: No, that’s a great question. I had no idea. When I started the book it was around the time that energy drinks were becoming controversial and my interest in caffeine was rekindled. I knew there was a story here. I had no idea where it would lead. Yes, it took me to places that I really didn’t anticipate and that’s part of the reason it ended up, it took me more than three years from when I started researching the book until I finished it.
Dr. L Belisle: I’m interested in caffeine because as a physician I know that there is an impact on health. I don’t know what the long-term impact is of caffeine on health. I’m not sure that any of us really quite know that yet, but short term I have seen patients who have come in with panic attacks, anxiety. I’ve had triathletes who rely heavily on caffeine to enhance their performance. I’ve seen people who have tachycardia, elevated heart rate and this is something that you talk about in the book.
Murray: Yeah, so I’m really glad you mentioned anxiety and panic first because most of us and I think its popularity indicates this, most of us handle moderate caffeine consumption quite well, but there are some people for whom it can really be a problem. People who suffer from anxiety and particularly those with panic disorder. People who experience panic attacks really can have problems with caffeine and this is one its better known problems, but it’s an area that scientists are continuing to research to understand exactly how it is that caffeine affects people who are anxious.
That’s certainly one of the bigger health problems. It’s worth noting people who are anxious often tend to avoid caffeine, but not everyone. I’ve had some interesting correspondence from people who didn’t really associate the anxiety they were experiencing with their caffeine consumption. Something you didn’t mention is sleep and that’s another big issue. A lot of people as you know you see a lot of patients so many don’t sleep well and so many of us use caffeine. Caffeine really can disrupt sleep.
This is not to say that everybody who uses caffeine would sleep better if they didn’t take caffeine, but I really do think it’s important for someone who suffers from sleeplessness or insomnia to at least try to experiment with their caffeine consumption to see if it helps. It won’t help everyone but some people it might.
Dr. L Belisle: You talked about being sensitive to caffeine, so some people are more sensitive, some people are less sensitive. In the book, you mention that people who smoke and women who are on birth control bills, both of these things influence how we metabolize caffeine.
Murray: Yeah, you’re right. Again, it’s interesting because it’s a drug and we often don’t think of it as a drug, but because it’s a drug it will affect you differently depending on what else is going on in your body. One of the strange things is that smokers tend to metabolize caffeine twice as quickly as the rest of us which is to say a cup of coffee will have half of the effect on a smoker. A woman on birth control pills will metabolize it again this is approximate but approximately twice as slowly. A lot of this has to do with the rate at which the liver produces the enzymes that break down caffeine into its byproduct.
It’s really worth noting this because let’s say you have someone who’s a big man and he’s a smoker and he’s sitting down with a smaller woman and she’s on birth control pills. He may need five or six cups of coffee to have the same effect that she has. Now laid on top of this is another very interesting aspect which is we all metabolize caffeine differently just due to individual variability. A lot of this tends to be genetics so if you tend to consume a lot of caffeine, then probably your brother or sister or parents might. If you don’t, it might be again a genetic trait. This is all to say that a cup of coffee is not going to have the same effect on any of us. The levels of variability can be pretty profound.
Dr. L Belisle: For a long time, we’ve been trying to understand if there is a long term impact of caffeine upon the body. One area that still remains unclear, but we think we’re getting more evidence in is in pregnancy, women who consume caffeine in larger quantities I believe they are more likely to have a small for gestational age or a small birth weight baby.
Murray: Yeah, and this is an area again even after many years of research people are still learning more about this. Often doctors will suggest that women who are pregnant limit their caffeine consumption to two hundred milligrams a day or less. This could be as little as twelve to fifteen ounces of coffee. There is some new research from Scandinavia that suggests that even at two hundred milligrams a day you may have a slightly smaller child. It’s not that the child will necessarily be less healthy but it is suggesting that even at that level, even at two hundred milligrams a day the caffeine could be having an effect.
It’s one of the areas of caffeine in health that has gotten a fair amount of attention, but I think deserves more and again more research, but yeah I think this is the reason that doctors suggest that pregnant women limit their caffeine consumption.
Dr. L Belisle: Yet, there is a side of caffeine that I guess some people would consider positive. We know that it actually increases alertness. It enables us to concentrate better. It helps athletes. I think that from what I’m remembering is it’s a three milligram or four milligram per dose that is useful.
Murray: You’re absolutely right and again this is one of the things that surprised me in researching the book. Again going back to college, I used to race bicycles in college and so even when I was first learning about caffeine and coffee I knew that if you took a strong cup of coffee before a race you’d get a little bit of a boost. In the recent years, exercise physiologists have figured out much more precisely what the best dose is and how it can benefit you and you’re right so three to six milligrams per kilo of body weight which would be for a hundred and eighty pound guy like me maybe two hundred and fifty milligrams.
A really good strong twelve or sixteen ounce cup of coffee will not just improve your performance but it will improve it significantly which is to say on a race of approximately an hour’s duration I would reduce my time probably between one and three percent. This would often be the winning margin in most of these races. Yeah it’s pretty dramatic and it’s perfectly legal. This is the other really interesting aspect of this is because it really is I think there’s no question it’s a performance-enhancing drug and it’s a legal performance-enhancing drug. The reason is this the exact dosage that would benefit you or I most before a race is the same amount that a coffee drinker would be consuming every single day.
It’s pretty remarkable and I think it’s one of those aspects of caffeine that’s under appreciated. That’s why there’s so many gels and foods that are specially formulated for athletes now, for triathletes, marathoners.
Dr. L Belisle: Yeah you’ve brought a bunch of things with you today. You have shot blocks and you have shot gels and you have I don’t know if that’s a 5-Hour Energy. I mean there’s so many things now that caffeine is in, and K-Cups. You have a K-Cup in here.
Murray: Yes.
Dr. L Belisle: Caffeine and that’s not even, we haven’t even, that’s just scratching the surface. Most sodas have caffeine in them.
Murray: Yes, I’ve got a Coca-Cola bottle here too. Yes, you’re right. It’s everywhere. I think of it often as if you go into a convenience store here in Portland, anywhere back in the cooler you have a few doors full of sodas, virtually all of the sodas are caffeinated, all of the top five, eight of the ten top selling soft drinks in the US, right next door you have energy drinks of course they’re caffeinated. You have a whole aisle or a counter now of coffee in the back there. Get up towards the front and the counter is cluttered up with energy shots. There’s probably an aisle with over-the-counter stuff like Vivarin and NoDoz.
It’s really no exaggeration to say if you’re in a little convenience store anywhere in the US something caffeinated is within arm’s reach at every moment. This is part of what I came to think about that I think we don’t recognize its ubiquity. It’s importance in our lifestyle. We don’t associate the fact that we drink soda with caffeine. We don’t think about 5-Hour Energy as just pure caffeine which really is most of what’s giving you the effect. Yeah there’s an incredible diversity and abundance of new caffeinated products on the market these days.
Dr. L Belisle: Here on Love Maine Radio we’ve long recognized the link between health and wealth. Here to speak more on the topic is Tom Shepherd of Shepherd Financial.
Tom: Wouldn’t it be great if we could spend our days doing all the things we’ve dreamed of while gazing up at the stars on a crystal clear night. Yet for most people and I include myself in that group the realities of daily living prevent it from happening. We all have responsibilities to our employers, our families, people who rely on us to be there for them. What if you could get to a place where you are able to reinvent yourself and start a new journey that was more fulfilling? What if you could define what true north meant and find your star and start walking towards it? What if you had the money to embark on a second life because financial worry had fallen off your radar?
This my friends is what I call the seventh state of your financial evolution. While I’m certainly not there yet, I’m here to help you get there. It’s time to evolve. Get in touch with Shepherd Financial and we’ll help you evolve with your money.
Speaker 6: Securities offered through LPL financial member of FINRA, SIPC. Investment advice offered through Flagship Harbor Advisors a registered investment advisor. Flagship Harbor Advisors and Shepherd Financial are separate entities from LPL Financial.
Speaker 1: Love Maine Radio is brought to you by Bangor Savings Bank. For over a hundred and fifty years, Bangor Savings has believe that the innate ability of the people of Maine to achieve their goals and dreams, whether it’s personal finance, business banking or wealth management assistance you’re looking for, at Bangor Savings Bank you matter more. For more information visit, www.bangor.com.
Dr. L Belisle: I was very concerned to read about the way that we come to produce caffeine because we know that caffeine is in coffee beans. We know it’s in cacao beans so in chocolate. I think there are a few other natural products that grow with caffeine in them but much of the caffeine that is in sodas if not all of the caffeine that’s in sodas or these gels or the 5-Hour Energy is actually produced synthetically and with I guess proprietary secrets involved so we don’t even really know the chemicals that are going into this stuff and from what I read in your book the synthetic caffeine glows. It glows blue. That can’t be good.
Murray: Yeah, so I think they’ve been able to produce it so that it doesn’t glow as much anymore, but I don’t even know and yes it is a somewhat secretive process and let me back up on this difference. Caffeine there are two ways to extract it to produce caffeine, the caffeine powder itself. One way is to extract it from a coffee bean. I’ve toured a decaffeination facility in Texas that decaffeinates sixteen million pounds of coffee annually and they produce about a million pounds of caffeine.
As I started doing my research, I realized we’re using more than fifteen million pounds of powdered caffeine in this country annually. Most of it blended into soft drinks and I didn’t know where it came from. As I investigated, I learned that most of it is synthesized as you say so it’s made from its chemical precursor. One way to think of this is instead of carving it away from the coffee bean, you’re actually cobbling it together in a pharmaceutical plant from urea and other chemical precursors.
Dr. L Belisle: Which as you point out, that’s cat pee.
Murray: Well it smells like it yeah.
Dr. L Belisle: It’s smells like cat pee.
Murray: Yeah, right it’s a similar, when people think of urea they think of urine because it’s a form of nitrogen, yeah, right. Yeah so you can produce it from urea and these other chemical precursors. The actual product, the caffeine you’re making in a synthetic caffeine plant or you’re extracting from a natural product should be the same. I think the concern is a lot of these plants like the one I tried to visit in China are not only under regulated, they’re pretty opaque. They don’t want visitors.
I approached caffeination facilities in Germany, India, China, and they all denied my request to visit just to see the process as I had at the plant in Texas. Yeah, most of the caffeine, most of the caffeine we’re importing for soft drinks et cetera in this country is synthetic as opposed to natural because it’s the cheaper way to do it.
Dr. L Belisle: That’s I guess the thing that I am bothered by is that we already know that there are health effects good and bad of caffeine, but what about the chemicals? What about the things that we don’t even really think about we might be consuming on a regular basis because as you point out in your book the use of soda has actually surpassed the use of coffee as a delivery vehicle. Now younger people are on college campuses drinking 5-Hour Energy and Monster and caffeinated drinks and it’s not something we should be ignoring.
Murray: It’s not and so a couple of big issues there. First of all, I guess I’m not as concerned about chemical contamination of the caffeine powder itself just because we’re taking it in such small quantities so like a sixty-fourth of a teaspoon would be the amount in a Coca-Cola. It would take a lot of contamination to give you a significant harm. I do think there’s significant health issues that are worth discussing about these products made with caffeine powder.
One of them is as you mentioned with all of these energy drinks and this is something that FDA is looking at now are the other non-caffeine constituents either by themselves or in concert with caffeine causing some harm. This is taurine. There are a number of additives to these energy drinks. They probably don’t have much of a stimulant effect, but may have a health consequence. It’s not clear. FDA is looking into that. That’s one issue.
I think the bigger issue in terms of health is really the issue of sugars of the simple sugars that are in these soft drinks. We know the association between sugary soft drinks and sugar sweetened drinks and obesity. Obesity is a huge issue. The link with caffeine here is that it’s the caffeine in the soft drinks that often tends to really reinforce that behavior of consuming of soft drinks which is to say if you reach one day for a sugary soft drink without caffeine and the next day for the one with caffeine, you’re more inclined to go back to the caffeinated one. This is something that Coca-Cola and Pepsi and Dr. Pepper have known for a century.
Dr. L Belisle: It’s also as you have written about possibly causing insulin resistance so if you have somebody who’s reaching for that caffeinated sugary beverage and they keep reaching for that caffeinated sugary beverage over time their receptors are not going to be doing what they’re supposed to be and they’re possibly going to become diabetic.
Murray: Yeah, this is something that anyone who is either diabetic or pre-diabetic should certainly be interested in and be discussing with their doctor, but yeah that is one of the concerns.
Dr. L Belisle: On the other side of it, there is a history of caffeinated products. I mean we’ve had chocolate and coffee in their pure forms for years and years and years and it’s something that there is an important cultural aspect to this.
Murray: There’s a really important cultural aspect and this was another shock to me in reporting the book is how far back this goes so I visited an area in Mexico. This is on the border of what’s now Chiapas, southern Mexico and Guatemala, a low coastal plain called the Soconusco Region and it’s humid and swampy and hot, perfect place to grow cacao and three thousand five hundred years ago people were already consuming these frothy chocolate drinks there and we often don’t think of chocolate as being very caffeinated because we consume it in such dilute forms, but I think that the way that they were consuming it, you’re really just mashing up cacao beans and drinking this frothy chocolate drink. They were getting a fair amount of caffeine.
I think that the caffeine was a big part of the allure all the way back then and around the same time in China, in Asia people were learning if they had a tea leaf soaked in hot water they would get the same benefit. Coffee came on the scene much later I mean probably just fifteen hundred years ago but yeah culturally we love caffeine. There’s a long history and there’s a long history of safe usage of moderate caffeine consumption and the coffee culture that we’ve developed in the US is pretty phenomenal. People really do love caffeine and people particularly love coffee I think.
Dr. L Belisle: There’s also an environmental impact to coffee, to growing for example growing coffee beans and what some people are doing with the rain forest to grow more coffee beans, but people are responding to that as well, the [shade 00:24:05] grown fair trade. This is something we’re paying attention to more.
Murray: It is and that’s something that I didn’t focus on much in the book, but my reporting lead me to early on is that yes there can be significant environmental impacts to for example coffee consumption and what I hadn’t realized is how many different certifying schemes there are. There’s organic. There’s fair trade. There’s bird friendly, rain forest. All these different groups are certifying coffees now. I do think there’s some value in that and I think consumers also have to be maybe a little more savvy than in the old days and finding out how is their coffee certified and what exactly does that mean, but yeah I think people are interested in knowing what the environmental impact of their daily habit is.
Dr. L Belisle: Let’s talk about K-Cups you brought in the K-Cups. It was interesting for me to read about the history of Green Mountain Coffee. I went to medical school in Vermont and this came to be in Vermont, the Green Mountain Coffee guy who actually first got his money through rolling papers.
Murray: Yes, that was interesting. I didn’t know that so Bob Stiller who was the entrepreneur who’s behind Green Mountain Coffee roasters first made his fortune three million dollars by developing this company E-Z Wider to produce a wider rolling paper in the 1970s. When he and his partner sold the company, then Bob Stiller was in Vermont and he had one of those experiences. He tasted a cup of coffee that just knocked his socks off, freshly roasted, freshly ground, delicious, bought the company and that became Green Mountain Coffee roasters.
Dr. L Belisle: He continued to innovate
Murray: He continued to innovate. He was really shrewd in this respect. He saw the single serving pod revolution coming more clearly and earlier than others in the US. He first partnered a Massachusetts start up called Keurig. Then bought it. The Keurig machine and the K-Cup started off competing in really the coffee pot wars against Nestle, against Sara Lee, against Kraft, against all these huge multinational companies. At that time, Green Mountain really was as you know like a crunchy regional coffee company. They went up against these multinational coffee giants and won. I mean they won going [away 00:26:40]. Just last month GE announced, get this a refrigerator that has a Keurig machine in the door. Yeah, Keurig is really, they’ve really taken off.
Dr. L Belisle: You look at these little cups and I’m all about enjoying caffeine, but I shudder to think how much plastic we’re throwing away on a daily basis by using the single serving method.
Murray: Yeah, so it’s pretty remarkable. One of the elements in my book that got a lot of attention is that I calculated that the 2011 production of K-Cups if you line them up end to end they would encircle the globe six times at the equator. It’s a lot of K-cups. Updating that figure for the 2013, they would encircle the globe ten point five times at the equator, so there’s a lot of plastic here. One of the challenges with K-Cups is that for recyclers is it’s plastic and it’s foil and it’s organic matter all in one unit, so it’s really hard to recycle.
To the people who like K-Cups and the people who advocate for them and there is some legitimacy to this, they will say that you can extract more coffee, more efficiently from less coffee bean in this so the eleven grams in the little K-Cup would make a stronger cup of coffee than say if I was using my Melitta filter at home. Also that there’s less waste because you’re not making a coffee pot and then throwing out the rest at the end of the day. There are some interesting issues, but if you just look at the issue of the waste at the end of the day in your house a lot of people don’t like that a bit.
Green Mountain again last month or maybe in December said that by 2020 still a long way out they hope to have a fully recyclable K-Cup. I did see when I toured the plant in 2010 I saw a paper K-Cup that they were using. It was a prototype they were using for tea, but yeah these little pods are interesting. There’s one other aspect to these pods that’s fascinating which is the cost. If you look at the per pound cost for a coffee, the roasted and ground coffee that goes into a K-Cup would cost about twelve to fifteen dollars say at Hannaford. Once it’s the K-Cup the per pound value is closer to thirty-five to fifty-five dollars per pound. That’s the way you make a billion dollars with coffee.
Dr. L Belisle: One way that we’ve kept up the American interest in coffee and caffeinated beverages is in the military. I know that actually in the military we used to supply soldiers with cigarettes during the World War, second World War and we also have been plying them with caffeine.
Murray: Yes, I’m glad you brought that up. One of the researchers who was a primary source for my book Harris Lieberman studies this very thing, caffeine in the military and he does it from a military research lab in [Native 00:29:50] Massachusetts. One of the tests that he did was he followed Army Seals during hell week, sorry Navy Seals during hell week which is the week when they’re taking their final test to see if they can really have what it takes to be a Seal. They’re up most of the night. They’re in and out of the water. They’re practically hypothermic. They’re doing extreme things, carrying boats over their head, doing rescues, practicing marksmanship, all sorts of crazy stuff.
In the middle of this week when they were the most sleep deprived and really exhausted, he, Harris Lieberman ran them through a battery of tests to see how they would perform with and without caffeine. In virtually every scenario the caffeine enhanced their performance on a battery of tests. The only thing it didn’t help was marksmanship and it didn’t harm marksmanship. That’s a long winded way of saying the situations that soldiers might be in in the field where they’re sleep deprived, but they need to remain alert and vigilant is exactly the kind of situation in which caffeine can help.
The military has developed a whole battery of products, caffeinated energy bars, caffeinated gum, you name it and they have rations that include these various products.
Dr. L Belisle: In the end, I didn’t come away with the feeling that you were saying caffeine was good or bad. I think I just have this sense that you really wanted people to be more aware, more aware of the range. There’s this range over here where it can be possibly beneficial. There’s this range over here where it can actually be harmful. This is what it might be doing to the environment. It might be causing some physical dependence, but really you didn’t leave people with an answer on this. You left people with here’s some information, make up your own mind. Was that your intention?
Murray: That’s exactly it. My sense is that we consistently underestimate the role that caffeine plays in our culture. We underestimate the roles it plays in our daily routines. We underestimate the actual affects that it has in our body. We underestimate the role it plays in commerce. I think caffeinated products are worth more than a hundred and thirty billion dollars annually in the US alone. Yes, I think we can continually underestimate caffeine. It’s a much more interesting drug than we give it credit for. It deserves greater respect and more understanding.
Dr. L Belisle: Well I wish that you could have come through and said, Lisa I want you to think about caffeine this way. However, this was very mind opening and I think that people who want to take the time to read your book which is called Caffeinated: How Our Daily Habit Helps, Hurts, and Hooks Us, I think it’s thought provoking and I really appreciate your not only writing about it and researching it but also coming in and talking to us today.
Murray: Well thank you very much for you interest. This has been fun.
Dr. L Belisle: One last question, so we’ve been speaking with Murray Carpenter who is the journalist and author based in Belfast. Murray how can we learn more about the work that you do and your book Caffeinated?
Murray: You can go to any of the local independent bookstores. They all have the book there. You can visit my website which is murraycarpenter.com.
Dr. L Belisle: All right. Thanks so much Murray.
Murray: Thank you.