I don’t drink coffee these days. It’s a migraine trigger, so I had to reluctantly give it up. But, my, oh my, when passing a shop with that evocative aroma, that abstinence becomes very difficult indeed. However, my decision is a personal one. I do, however drink the occasional energy drink and it doesn’t have any deleterious effect. So, it’s not the caffeine, but something specific to coffee. All of that said, the puritans are at it again.
US officials are investigating the safety of caffeine in snacks and energy drinks, worried about the “cumulative impact” of the stimulant – which is added to a growing number of products. Is our tea and coffee-fuelled society too dependent on the world’s favourite drug?
I’m sorry? What part of anyone else’s business is it what we consume and how much? If an individual drinks too much coffee followed by a Red Bull chaser and some caffeinated chewing gum, that is their concern. It is not the concern of “officials” (and isn’t that a chilling term?). Once again, we have interfering busybodies poking about in matters that are none of their concern. If we are too dependent (and that is a subjective thing) then that is our concern, and it is up to us to do something about it should we so choose – it is not down to “officials” who know only one language, the language of the totalitarian health freak on the campaign trail:
As a result, the FDA has pledged to “determine what is a safe level” of caffeine use.
Ah, right, the great and the good will decide for us what is the okay limit – a bit like they did with alcohol; they will pluck it out of their collective arseholes. Especially since:
But there is far from any kind of scientific consensus that caffeine use is harmful. A recent study by the Harvard School of Public Health suggested that “coffee drinking doesn’t have any serious detrimental health effects” and that drinking up to six cups a day was “not associated with increased risk of death from any cause”.
Right, that’s a “fuck off and mind your own business”, then.
Most people are likely to have ascertained by adulthood how much, or little, tea or coffee they can tolerate at a time.
Quite.
But critics say this doesn’t apply to energy drinks and caffeinated foodstuffs, whose effects are arguably more difficult to judge.
Bollocks. Fuck off and mind your own damned business.
Mathematician Alfréd Rényi said, “a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems”
“fuck off and mind your own business”
I really couldn’t have put it better. Well said, LR.
If we did not eat the things that are supposedly bad for us we would starve. I remember back in the seventies when I was studying I came across a brilliant tongue-in-cheek piece by a professor who got fed up with his colleagues telling him what was safe to eat. He wrote a paper explaining how cornflakes were carcinogenic and a danger to health. His chemical analysis was quite correct, based on certain trace elements, although he did point out at the end that you would need to eat in the region of 4,000 packets a day for more than 100 years.
Longrider, you have my sympathy with the migraine, all of my family have suffered, although the good news is that the effect of the triggers on my mum and dad both disappeared after about 10 years. However, there is only one way to find out when the trigger is no longer effective and that can be somewhat unpleasant.