Your Coffee Addiction Is Probably Good for You — Transcript

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1. 0:03every man, woman and child.
2. 0:05The world's largest buyer of coffee, the US, has to import nearly all of this as the coffee
3. 0:09trees from which caffeine is harvested will only grow at commercial levels between the
4. 0:12tropic of cancer and the tropic of capricorn in an area called the coffee belt. Only a
5. 0:16single state, Hawaii, is within the belt.
6. 0:18However, the United States is only the largest buyer because it's so populous. The most enthusiastic
7. 0:22coffee drinkers per capita are, in increasing order, the Netherlands, Denmark, Iceland,
8. 0:26Norway and, the world champions, Finland, where they drink three times as much coffee
9. 0:30a day as the average American. All of these countries are outside of the coffee belt and
10. 0:34must import 100% of their caffeine supply.
11. 0:36To get this caffeine, first bees must pollinate the flowers of a coffee tree and these flowers
12. 0:40develop into bright red berries. Unlike more cooperative domesticated plants, the coffee
13. 0:44tree does not ripen all its berries at the same time so they need to be hand picked and
14. 0:47sorted.
15. 0:48Once picked, the coffee bean is removed from inside the berry. This young seedling of the
16. 0:52tree is then dried, heated, ground and submersed in boiling water to get out the precious,
17. 0:55precious caffeine. It takes about 40 coffee beans to make one shot of espresso.
18. 0:59But why is caffeine in the coffee beans in the first place? It's not like the coffee
19. 1:03trees want to have humans cutting bits of them off and committing a holocaust of their
20. 1:06offspring.
21. 1:07Well, the trees, of course, don't want or feel anything and originally evolved caffeine
22. 1:11for their own benefit. Caffeine is an insecticide that effectively paralyzes or kills bugs chomping
23. 1:15on the tree.
24. 1:16Whether or not the insects go out experiencing the greatest caffeine high ever is not known.
25. 1:21While caffeine is /technically/ lethal, it's adapted for for 1g bugs, not monkeys 100,000
26. 1:26times more massive. So you'd really have to try to win this Darwin Award.
27. 1:29But, if you must: to calculate the dose of caffeine you'll need to ingest to have a 50%
28. 1:33of death, take your mass in kilograms and multiply it by 150mg.
29. 1:38Or in terms of coffee, for every kilogram of mass you have you need to drink one latte
30. 1:41to get a visit from the grim reaper.
31. 1:43That's a lot of coffee so it's not suprising that there are no recored deaths in healthy
32. 1:46adults from this method and it's doubtful that it's even possible. Because, while you're
33. 1:50busy getting the coffee in, your body is busy getting it out by one way or another.
34. 1:54The rare recorded deaths from caffeine are from diet pills, pep pills and crazy people
35. 1:58who eat the drug in its pure form.
36. 2:00Poison though caffeine is, you do still develop addiction to the stuff. And it's is a real
37. 2:04physiological addiction not a wimpy psychological addition like people claim for videos games
38. 2:08and the internet.
39. 2:08But caffeine isn't heroine -- rapid withdrawal won't kill you -- it might make you cranky
40. 2:12and give you a wicked headache -- but since caffeine releases dopamine to make you happy
41. 2:16and it gets rid of headaches there's really no reason to ever stop using it.
42. 2:19And who would want to give up the stuff anyway? I mean, aside from converts to Mormonism and
43. 2:23Rastafarianism. Caffeine is the world's most used psychoactive drug -- and with good reason
44. 2:27it's pure awesome.
45. 2:28It increases concentration, decreases fatigue and gives you better memory.
46. 2:31This isn't just a placebo -- these are real effects replicable in a laboratory.
47. 2:35And, contrary to popular belief, drinking coffee isn't a faustian bargain where the
48. 2:39devil gives you the ability to work faster but in exchange makes your life shorter.
49. 2:43For normal, healthy humans there are no medical concerns. Coffee and the caffeine within it
50. 2:47may even has medical benefits such as protection from cardiovascular disease, diabetes and
51. 2:50Parkinson's.
52. 2:52Caffeine can even get rid of migraines, but the amount required and the and method of
53. 2:55ingestion is... uncomfortable.
54. 2:57Moving right along...
55. 2:58You know what else you can thank caffeine for? A little thing called the enlightenment.
56. 3:02In the 1600s people drank more beer and gin than water. But with the introduction of coffee
57. 3:06and tea, people switched from a depressant to a stimulant. It's not surprising then that
58. 3:10this time was an intellectual boon compared to earlier centuries.
59. 3:13Ben Franklin and Edward Lloyd loved their coffee for the same reason that modern workers
60. 3:16and students do. It's invaluable for staying awake and concentrating when you need to finish
61. 3:20a TPS report or to get through that boring physics class.
62. 3:23Coffee is the fuel of the modern world, so go grab a cup guilt-free and get working smarter
63. 3:26and faster.