For the love of coffee.

“Away, away with coffee!

Away, away with tea!

Milk and eggs are the best for me!”

 

We were taught so many nursery rhymes in preschool, and yet perhaps this is the one which sticks out in my memory the most. We have cassette tapes stashed somewhere here at home, blatantly documenting my leading my younger sisters through this verse. It had seemed like a universal truth back then, and up until I got to med school I never really gave much thought to its applicability in relation to my age.

 

I guess this notion, that coffee and tea are bad for you, really hammered itself well into my sense of right and wrong that I stayed away from coffee for most of my life. Even during my first three years of medical school, while my flatmates Tannia and Ann were downing coffee practically every night to stay up and study, I generally relied on my natural physiologic stimulants to keep me awake and to keep me going.

 

A lot of good that did. By the middle of my third year in med school I started drinking that once taboo beverage, in the midst of my growing desperation to stay conscious, coherent and ambulatory in the face of so many sleepless nights. Needless to say, I began my journey into the world of coffee addiction with a blue sachet of Nescafe Ice, which was all the craze back then, and judging from my growing dependence on this oh so marvelous potion, never to get out again.

 

I can’t live without coffee. If I don’t chug up a cup in the morning, I get more or less doomed to a day of drowsiness and, occasionally, a generally depressed mood. At night, if on duty at the hospital and I don’t guzzle down really strong coffee well before the onset of sleepiness, I transform into an incomprehensible and nonfunctional zombie.

 

I just remembered this time I was manning the triage table at the ER. I had with me then a transparent jug of cold café mocha which I had prepared earlier in the day. When a resident saw what I had with me, he said, “Ano yan, UGIB?” (Is that UGIB?) In layman’s terms, UGIB which stands for upper gastrointestinal bleed, is simply bloody gastric juice, which in retrospect did resemble the coffee I had then. It’s funny, actually, although some people may be grossed out by the thought.

 

Well, the bottom line is, I really cannot live without coffee. I’ve gotten so dependent on it, that the problem is that I may have become tolerant to it as well. I can fall asleep right after my third cup of coffee, sometimes even right in the middle of drinking it. Still another downside to this addiction is that I have probably developed narcolepsy. I am now known as the girl who can doze off in the middle of interviewing a patient, while standing up mind you, and that who can fall asleep while walking in the wards. Sometimes when I go back to my notes I find illegible passages of squiggles obviously scrawled in the middle of stuporous note-taking. Yes, it can get that bad.

 

Hence, my absolute need for coffee, taken at the right time and with the right potency. Well, any stimulant for that matter. Teh tarik, which literally means hand-pull milk tea, is a wonderful alternative. But then I’d still have to import the stuff from

Singapore

, and since I don’t always get a lot of relatives and friends coming to the

Philippines

from there, I literally have to ration what stash I have. Good old simple tea—I especially love oolong tea mixed with jasmine tea—works if I need a jolt in the middle of the day, but it is not enough to keep me going for more than 24 hours. And well, during that hesitant period when I was still pondering whether to take up drinking coffee or not, I actually played around with the thought of taking caffeine pills. But then, you know, nothing really beats waking up to the taste and aroma of freshly brewed coffee flavored with milk or creamer (nonfat, of course) and muscovado sugar.

 

I’m no coffee connoisseur, mind you. I still wouldn’t be able to tell if it’s French roast or Arabica, although I can, of course, tell if it’s barako as any nincompoop ought to be able to.

 

Oh, and yes, perhaps the most wonderful thing to come out of this addiction is that recent research has shown that coffee, in fact, is good for you, good for me, good for everyone. Contrary to the old belief that coffee gives you hypertension and predisposes you to a host of diseases, we now know that coffee, to put it in a general sense, has been shown to fight cancer. One study has suggested that an increased intake of coffee and tea may lead to moderately decreased risk for renal cell cancer, while another has shown that coffee significantly protects against breast cancer in women with a mutation in the BRCA1 gene, which is the gene associated with breast cancer. Also, a meta-analysis on coffee intake and the risk for hepatocellular cancer points to a significant inverse relationship between the two. To add to that, coffee has even been shown to enhance liver function.

 

And here’s great news for my dad who, despite being a heavy coffee drinker himself, has been on my case for drinking too much coffee. He’s been worried that I might get diabetes, especially since it’s a disease that runs in my family. Well, mon cher Papa, coffee has been shown to significantly decrease the risk for type 2 diabetes mellitus, provided that we don’t pile on the sugar, of course.

 

Furthermore, coffee has also been shown to help boost the immune system by activating our macrophages against H2O2 production and protecting our lymphocytes from DNA damage, among many other mechanisms. Several sources also cite that increased intake of coffee has been shown to significantly decrease the risk for gout in men. In addition to that, it has been shown that among French women with no prior cognitive dysfunction, those who drank four or more cups of coffee daily had significantly less cognitive decline as compared to those who drank at most one cup daily—this neuroprotective effect was even more evident at higher ages.

 

Having said all that, I guess I don’t even need to say that, to top everything off, coffee is one helluva great upper—I always get awfully bubbly and cheery after a cup.

 

Grand, isnt’ it?

 

Now before I end this entry and before you rush off to indulge yourself in a cup of what I would like to call one of man’s greatest concoctions, remember that coffee does have its downside. For one, you wouldn’t want to drink too much of it lest you want the jitters. Second, you should know better than to drink it on an empty stomach or if you already have dyspepsia. Third, and this applies to us women, know that it has been said that caffeine impedes calcium metabolism. My own personal research into this claim, however, has led to inconsistent results.

 

While some studies claim that moderate coffee intake does not significantly affect calcium metabolism, others claim that coffee does impair its absorption. Nonetheless, all of the studies I read would agree that significant reduction in calcium levels in the background of coffee intake only occurred in women whose baseline calcium intake was already low to begin with. So unless we want to get osteoporotic early on, we simply have to stock up on calcium every time we drink coffee. While one study suggests taking in about 2 glasses of milk for every cup of coffee, another says that 2 tablespoons of milk should do the trick. Whatever the case, we simply should ensure that we take in the recommended daily calcium intake of 2000mg, to prevent the precious calcium from ebbing away from our bones.

 

Going back to the nursery rhyme, aside from the ironic observation that what was taught to be good for us then can actually be bad for us now (that’s if you continue to drink full cream milk and eat more than 2 eggs a week, more so if you fry them), well, all I can say is that they should stop teaching such misleading poems to innocent little kids. Ok, that may be overstating it. But do indulge me and allow me to share my proposed revision to this very influential nursery rhyme. This, I believe, is what they should be teaching innocent little pre-schoolers instead:

 

“They’re not bad, coffee and tea!

But because I’m a kiddie,

Milk and eggs are the best for me!”

P.S. I did my research mostly via Pubmed.com. For a copy/list of my resources, just ask me for them as I saved most of them on my laptop.

 

Comments

[Naomi]

Hello weena baby... I use splenda, alternative to sugar.. it can be bought in the U.S., I am not sure if they have it in duty free. Splenda is a sweetener, with low calories, and for people with health problems... just google it. It comes in sachets :)I have one huge box of it here at home. happy drinking my fella coffee addict

[Weena]

hey, naoms. yes, actually, i do have a stash of that at home, too. according to the sachet it contains dextrose and maltodextrose and sucralose, which are also forms of sugar. how they supposedly lead to lower calories as compared to sucrose is beyond me. perhaps it's because sucrose has, what, 12 carbons and dextrose has only 6? hahaha. organic chem.