Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Aaron Welsh, and I'm Aaron Oman Updike.
Speaker 2: And I'm Matt can Daz.
Speaker 1: And this is this podcast will Kill You Crossover Edition.
Speaker 2: Within Defensive Plans.
Speaker 1: Yes, I'm so excit.
Speaker 3: I did really excited. We've been waiting a long time.
Speaker 3: I can't believe this is the first one we've done
Speaker 3: this season.
Speaker 1: That's not we did Risin.
Speaker 3: When was that?
Speaker 2: That felt like forever ago? By the way, it was.
Speaker 3: Like seven years ago.
Speaker 2: Easily much has changed in the meantime.
Speaker 3: I don't remember anything about Ricin.
Speaker 1: I gotta tell you come on the umbrellas like Pellett.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, okay, what bad seed?
Speaker 2: I thought about it yesterday when I was covered in ticks.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, okay, now I remember. Thanks for reminding me.
Speaker 1: There's so much. I feel like if somebody drew up
Speaker 1: a pop quiz of like facts I learned on TPWKY,
Speaker 1: I would fail.
Speaker 3: I'd be embarrassing.
Speaker 2: I had someone write me the other day and say,
Speaker 2: in one episode you said this, but then in another
Speaker 2: episode you contradicted your your perception on that. I was like,
Speaker 2: I don't know, I changed my mind. I guess I
Speaker 2: don't even remember saying that. Cool thank you for paying attention.
Speaker 1: Oh well, what are we talking about on this very
Speaker 1: exciting crossover episode.
Speaker 3: We're talking about the thing keeping me alive right now,
Speaker 3: and that is caffeine.
Speaker 2: My heart just swells when you say it.
Speaker 1: I mean how much when I was when you guys
Speaker 1: were reading about this or researching this, how much were
Speaker 1: you craving coffee or tea or chocolate or whatever it was.
Speaker 3: I have had no less than six cups of coffee
Speaker 3: in the last thirty six hours, in which I have
Speaker 3: also had less than two hours of discontinuous sleep.
Speaker 1: That doesn't sound great, Eric.
Speaker 2: Ooh yeah, mental health. Take care of yourself.
Speaker 3: We can talk about why it works, though it's gonna.
Speaker 1: Be really exciting. Why it works for now?
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 2: Well, I did all my research in the morning while
Speaker 2: I was drinking coffee, so it was perfect.
Speaker 1: Oh excellent. So to celebrate this wonderful thing to which
Speaker 1: we are all I can assume addicted. What are we drinking?
Speaker 1: What's our quarantini?
Speaker 3: It's the caffeined get it?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Oh, Aaron, what's in the caffeine?
Speaker 1: It's kind of like a take on a white Russian
Speaker 1: So it's vodka. It's got Kalua. It's got chai tea
Speaker 1: syrup cream, and then to make it even more caffeine friendly,
Speaker 1: we're gonna toss in like a swirl of chocolate syrup
Speaker 1: on top and then garnish with like a cinnamon stick
Speaker 1: if you have one. Yeah, I'm not sure that I.
Speaker 2: Do so I'm allergic to cinnamon.
Speaker 1: So no, no, entirely.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's tragedy, pure tragedy.
Speaker 3: We'll post the full recipe for that quarantini as well
Speaker 3: as our non alcoholic but still caffeine friendly plus see
Speaker 3: ber Rita on our social media channels and our website.
Speaker 3: This podcast will kill you dot com.
Speaker 1: We sure will. So we just did an awesome interview today.
Speaker 1: It was so much fun with Corey from opp which
Speaker 1: is Other People's Podcast. It's a podcast where he interviews
Speaker 1: other people about their podcasts.
Speaker 3: It's super fun.
Speaker 1: It's really fun. It was such a great experience. You
Speaker 1: guys should go check it out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, thanks for having a song, Corey. It was so fun.
Speaker 1: All right, So now ZEP, business done taken care.
Speaker 3: Of I think we took care of taking care of business, TCOB.
Speaker 3: This is going to be a great episode.
Speaker 1: Well, I think we already need a short break, maybe,
Speaker 1: I definitely think, so, all right, we'll do that and
Speaker 1: then we'll come back with some caffeine, okay, the story
Speaker 1: of caffeine. So when I was preparing this, I was like, Okay,
Speaker 1: I don't know if I should concentrate more on coffee
Speaker 1: or tea, or cacao or any of the other caffeine
Speaker 1: containing plants or foods or beverages that we consume. And
Speaker 1: I'm sure, Matt, you'll talk about some of those other ones. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And then one thought that occurred to me was like,
Speaker 1: maybe I'll write out a different history for each of those.
Speaker 1: I'll do I'll write out a thing for coffee, I'll
Speaker 1: write out a thing for tea, and I'll write out
Speaker 1: a thing for cacao. And I'll be like, you guys
Speaker 1: choose they could choose your own adventure. And then I
Speaker 1: was like, why would I do that to myself?
Speaker 2: Each one of those is a novel in and of itself.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I struggled. So instead I decided to just do
Speaker 1: a very general overview of caffeine, mostly concentrating on the
Speaker 1: big hitters coffee and tea, with a little bit of
Speaker 1: cacao thrown in there. Awesome So I want to start
Speaker 1: by just going over a little bit of the origin stories,
Speaker 1: the best part of every superhero movie. So let's start
Speaker 1: with tea. So tea was supposedly discovered by shen Nung,
Speaker 1: the mythical first Emperor of China and the inventor of
Speaker 1: all kinds of things, from animal husbandry to the plow,
Speaker 1: to plant based medicine, and of course tea. And so
Speaker 1: the story goes a little something like this. One day
Speaker 1: shen Nung sat down under a shady shrub to escape
Speaker 1: the heat in a particularly hot day, and then he
Speaker 1: decided to cool off by building a fire. I don't
Speaker 1: understand how that would work, and then boiling some water
Speaker 1: to drink again doesn't seem like a particularly cool down experience.
Speaker 1: You know, the boiled water thing actually did make sense
Speaker 1: because he had noticed that people who boiled their water
Speaker 1: tended to get sick less often, which is pretty cool.
Speaker 1: But as he was building up his fire by adding
Speaker 1: more branches, a few of the leaves on the shrub
Speaker 1: that he was sitting under, they just like happened to
Speaker 1: fall into his pot of boiling water, and he was like,
Speaker 1: you know what, I'm not dipping my hand in there
Speaker 1: and scooping them out. I'm just gonna let them stay
Speaker 1: in the water. And then he drank it and he
Speaker 1: was like, what is this? This is delicious. I want
Speaker 1: to drink more of this. I need to tell everyone
Speaker 1: about this. And of course it was tea.
Speaker 3: Can I just say that story reminds me a lot
Speaker 3: of the Willow story of the guy trying to take
Speaker 3: a rest behind a tree and then chewing on some
Speaker 3: bark and being like, ooh my pain is gone.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, oh fun. Always these fortuitous discoveries that just
Speaker 1: somehow under trees, get under.
Speaker 2: Trees if you're stumped, just you know where to sit.
Speaker 3: On a stump.
Speaker 1: Oh that was so dorky. I liked it. I'm for it, okay. So,
Speaker 1: also in addition to being the discoverer of tea, he
Speaker 1: also recognized a lot of the stimulatory is that a
Speaker 1: word properties of tea. So he actually kept track of
Speaker 1: his own medical records. So there are like hundreds of
Speaker 1: pages of his own like this is what my bladder was, like,
Speaker 1: this is what my temperature was whatever, and this is
Speaker 1: what the bile was. But he wrote down in his
Speaker 1: records that tea was good for tumors or abscesses that
Speaker 1: come about the head or for ailments of the bladder.
Speaker 1: It dissipates heat caused by phlems or inflammation of the chest.
Speaker 1: It quenches thirst, it lessens the desire for sleep. It
Speaker 1: gladdens and cheers the heart. Also true, and so because
Speaker 1: of these amazing benefits of tea, this drink steadily grew
Speaker 1: in popularity in China and then downright exploded during the
Speaker 1: Tang dynasty between six hundred and nine hundred CE. But
Speaker 1: outside of China, the first references to tea come from
Speaker 1: about nine hundred CE in writings by Arab traders. But
Speaker 1: no one in Europe or the New World or anywhere
Speaker 1: else really knew that much about tea or cared to
Speaker 1: investigate it further until the mid fifteen hundreds, despite the
Speaker 1: fact that there was, you know, ample trade going on.
Speaker 1: But remember that date in mid fifteen hundreds. Okay, okay,
Speaker 1: So now coffee, the coffee bush, as I'm sure you'll
Speaker 1: talk about, maybe matt grows throughout Africa, and that's probably
Speaker 1: where it originated, like Ethiopia area.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've heard like sort of Middle Eastern.
Speaker 1: Middle Eastern, like Yemen, Ethiopia areas, But it doesn't seem
Speaker 1: that coffee was used by or even known to anyone
Speaker 1: in any of like the a worlds like ancient Greece,
Speaker 1: Ancient Rome, ancient Middle East, or ancient Africa. There is
Speaker 1: some evidence that in Ethiopia, coffee beans were first consumed
Speaker 1: by people, possibly as small balls consisting of like the
Speaker 1: ground fruit and then the bean itself, and then packed
Speaker 1: together with lard to make like a little energy ball,
Speaker 1: energy bites, energy bytes. I mean, I mean, I have
Speaker 1: always loved eating like chocolate covered coffee beans, and then
Speaker 1: I find myself being like, why do why can't I sleep?
Speaker 1: Why do I feel?
Speaker 3: So?
Speaker 1: What's the word alert on edge? On edge?
Speaker 2: Yeah, my grandmother used to give them to me as
Speaker 2: a kid, and she would call them goatterds. She's like,
Speaker 2: you want some goat ds? And eventually I learned that, yeah,
Speaker 2: I do.
Speaker 1: Like, that's not going to put me off them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, welcome to my life.
Speaker 1: Well, and then there's the whole thing about like the
Speaker 1: civet and the most expensive coffee in the world is
Speaker 1: like the one that has been passed through a civet's
Speaker 1: intestines poop bowels. Yeah, anyway, okay, And so there are
Speaker 1: some historical references to ancient documents or accounts of coffee
Speaker 1: drinking as early as the sixth century, but the earliest
Speaker 1: indisputable records put that timing as no earlier than the
Speaker 1: middle of the fifteenth century. In the Sufi monasteries of
Speaker 1: the Yemen in southern Arabia, and this story goes a
Speaker 1: little something like this, and Ethiopian goatherd named Kaldi was
Speaker 1: out hurting his goats one day when he noticed his
Speaker 1: flock nibbling on some bright red berries on a certain bush,
Speaker 1: and they wouldn't come over when he called. But when
Speaker 1: he found them, they were all jumping and kind of
Speaker 1: like frantically and frenzied dancing around. He was like, okay,
Speaker 1: it has to do something with these red berries on
Speaker 1: this bush. So what would happen if I tasted them?
Speaker 1: So he chewed on some of the berries himself, and
Speaker 1: he liked what he tasted. So he's like, all right,
Speaker 1: I'm going to gather a handful of these and bring
Speaker 1: them to the nearby monastery. But the holy men of
Speaker 1: the monastery did not approve of these devilish red berries,
Speaker 1: and so they threw them into the fire, which then
Speaker 1: only led to the most delicious smelling aroma, and they
Speaker 1: were like, well, not so fast. So they dragged these
Speaker 1: beans from the ashes, ground them up, and then dissolved
Speaker 1: them in hot water, leading to the first cup of coffee.
Speaker 3: What an interesting story.
Speaker 2: I mean, so many steps in there. I would have
Speaker 2: loved to see sort of the thought process.
Speaker 1: Back to the fire you must go so these I mean,
Speaker 1: of course, this story, just as the one previous, might
Speaker 1: just be a story like right, But somehow, somehow, the
Speaker 1: infusion of both tea leaves and coffee beans had led
Speaker 1: to this discovery that whatever the infusion was was delicious
Speaker 1: in some way, even though it's bitter and surprising, people
Speaker 1: found it that delicious. But maybe that's just the power
Speaker 1: of caffeine. Okay, So now cacao. Cacao was first cultivated
Speaker 1: not by Mayans but by the Olemes who lived in
Speaker 1: the lowlands of Mexico from around fifteen hundred to five
Speaker 1: hundred BCE, and they used the cacao pods to make
Speaker 1: a chocolate drink. And there's even evidence on a pottery
Speaker 1: jar from like five hundred CE found in Guatemala that
Speaker 1: has hieroglyphs that indicate cacao and analysis like an analysis
Speaker 1: of the contents of the pot showed traces of caffeine
Speaker 1: and through theobromine nice, and the drink was called chocolatl
Speaker 1: of course. And then the Mayans after them, So the
Speaker 1: Mayans after the Olmes so around one thousand BCE to
Speaker 1: two fifty CE, followed the Omex in this using cacao
Speaker 1: as currency often, and then after the Mayans it was
Speaker 1: picked up by the toll Text between the tenth and
Speaker 1: twelfth centuries, and then finally by the Aztecs from the
Speaker 1: twelfth centuries until the Spanish CONQUESTA arrived in the mid
Speaker 1: fifteen hundreds and had chocolate for the first time and
Speaker 1: then destroyed everything. Yeah, and so like also just a
Speaker 1: note on naming. When Cortes first arrived to you know,
Speaker 1: start the fall of the Aztec Empire, he was given chocolate,
Speaker 1: you know, initially in this warm welcome and he was like,
Speaker 1: this is so delicious, this is the drink of the gods.
Speaker 1: Hence theobroma cacao.
Speaker 2: Wow. Yeah, I don't think I ever put.
Speaker 1: That together, Okay, So with tea, coffee and chocolate. I
Speaker 1: stopped at around the mid fifteen hundreds because that was
Speaker 1: in general, the time when each of those stopped being
Speaker 1: known to only the region they originated in, and that's
Speaker 1: when they began this worldwide tour of notoriety that would
Speaker 1: lead to caffeine consumption on a scale that has never decreased.
Speaker 3: That is so interesting that all three kind of coalesced
Speaker 3: at the same time.
Speaker 1: I think a lot of it has to do also
Speaker 1: with just the timing of like when long distance traveling
Speaker 1: was made more possible and when you know, sort of
Speaker 1: as it coincided with as we talked about in the
Speaker 1: Screwby episode. I think like there was all of a
Speaker 1: sudden a need to go trade more, and the shipbuilding
Speaker 1: really increased, and that technology for traveling long distances increased.
Speaker 1: And then of course, like when you find something like
Speaker 1: this that is widely consumed in a certain area and
Speaker 1: found to be delicious, you are probably one of the
Speaker 1: things that first occurs to you is how can I
Speaker 1: make money off this? How can I progress this?
Speaker 3: Of course?
Speaker 2: Yeah, And like I mean, we all use it for productivity.
Speaker 2: Imagine when that started to catch on among all of
Speaker 2: the already crazy economic progress quote unquote that was happening.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, exactly, and so these yeah, of course,
Speaker 1: began to be highly sought after, particularly in Europe and
Speaker 1: North America during the sixteen hundreds when colonialism was raging,
Speaker 1: of course, and these caffeinated beverages may have come along
Speaker 1: at just the right time. So temperance movements in Europe
Speaker 1: had happened before. They had started and failed, and started
Speaker 1: and failed long before coffee and tea came onto the scene.
Speaker 1: And they failed largely because the proponents of these movements
Speaker 1: didn't have an alternative beverage to suggest to replace alcohol.
Speaker 1: They were like, you need to stop drinking. And they
Speaker 1: were like, all right, maybe I will, but what should
Speaker 1: I drink instead? Drink the poop infused water, Like, no,
Speaker 1: it's not good. And so when coffee and tea and
Speaker 1: hot chocolate came onto the scene, alcohol at that time
Speaker 1: was consumed at every meal, breakfast, lunch, dinner by every
Speaker 1: person in Europe, whether you're a child or some who's
Speaker 1: working or someone who's elderly. You know, it was ubiquitous.
Speaker 1: And you know, in a way alcohol was safer than
Speaker 1: the water because at least killed a lot of the germs.
Speaker 1: So when tea and coffee replaced the morning beer or
Speaker 1: the lunchtime poor people saw a noticeable shift in the
Speaker 1: productivity and safety of the workplace. I mean, to go fague, like,
Speaker 1: I never even thought of it. And there's the fact
Speaker 1: that these beverages were boiled, and so that also reduced
Speaker 1: the chance of getting some sort of water born pathogen
Speaker 1: or parasite.
Speaker 2: What a massive cultural shift to go from being drunk
Speaker 2: all day to just drinking caffeine all day. That must
Speaker 2: have been huge.
Speaker 1: It's huge, It's it's wild. And so these caffeine drinks,
Speaker 1: these caffeinated drinks were credited or have been credited, with
Speaker 1: shaping the entire European workforce and leading to a burst
Speaker 1: of creativity, an ingenuity. Eventually that paved the way for
Speaker 1: the industrial revolution. I mean, it's a bit of a
Speaker 1: you know, maybe that's a stretch, but I don't know,
Speaker 1: it's not a stretch.
Speaker 3: Let's take it.
Speaker 2: Let's just say it made an impact.
Speaker 1: And then so that is so cool. Isn't that amazing?
Speaker 1: And these beverages were also held to be indirectly responsible
Speaker 1: for other kinds of revolutions, namely political ones. So tea houses,
Speaker 1: which had been popular in China since the thirteenth century CE,
Speaker 1: they started to become popular in Europe and in the
Speaker 1: New World as well, and coffee houses also sprung up
Speaker 1: and were incredibly widespread and popular, Like the amount of
Speaker 1: coffee houses per per capita was like maybe only we
Speaker 1: now have reached it and so. And for instance, in
Speaker 1: England they were given the name Penny universities to describe
Speaker 1: how people and men were only allowed in the coffee
Speaker 1: houses at the time, how men would go to these
Speaker 1: coffee houses to talk about philosophy or politics, or to
Speaker 1: hear music or poetry. So like, in many ways they
Speaker 1: still exist in the same capacity today, which I think
Speaker 1: is really interesting, like the open mic night at the
Speaker 1: coffee house.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's like a gathering place, not just yeah.
Speaker 1: Not just and so like some of the documentaries that
Speaker 1: I watched was like, you know, would the same political
Speaker 1: discourse be held at a bar and the same actions
Speaker 1: be planned in like a logical way then they would
Speaker 1: be at a coffee house fueled by alcohol versus fueled
Speaker 1: by caffeine. Like when are you going to most get
Speaker 1: the ends that you're planning? I guess, I don't know.
Speaker 1: Fascinating interesting to think about. There were still temperance movements,
Speaker 1: but this time against coffee primarily and also tea, or
Speaker 1: it was like alternatively coffee and then tea. But yeah,
Speaker 1: so back on the revolution thing. In the British colonies
Speaker 1: of the New World, coffee houses in Boston were essentially
Speaker 1: the headquarters of the American Revolution. The Boston Tea Party
Speaker 1: was planned at a coffee house called the Green Dragon,
Speaker 1: and the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence
Speaker 1: was held at another Boston coffee house, the Bunch of Grapes.
Speaker 3: Nice, that's funny, kind of a fun name.
Speaker 1: And of course tea itself, or rather the import tax
Speaker 1: on tea and the British government allowing the East India
Speaker 1: Company to also tax the import of tea on the colonists.
Speaker 1: That was all part of the reason for the American
Speaker 1: Revolution in the first place. And that also kind of
Speaker 1: brings me to the dark side of coffee and tea
Speaker 1: and chocolate. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Always, it's always a dark side.
Speaker 1: It's always a dark side. So coffee and tea were
Speaker 1: both in incredibly high demand in European countries and in
Speaker 1: the British colonies in the New World, but caffeine addiction
Speaker 1: was an expensive habit to pick up in those early days.
Speaker 1: As the cultivation of the plants was pretty restricted. So anytime,
Speaker 1: for instance, that coffee beans were sent out from Mocha,
Speaker 1: which is where they were primarily grown, they were made
Speaker 1: sure to not able to be germinated or to not
Speaker 1: be able to grow into any viable plants. And it's
Speaker 1: sort of like what we saw with the Sanshona bark
Speaker 1: in the malaria episode and restrictions on that plant being
Speaker 1: grown elsewhere. But eventually, you know, where there's a will,
Speaker 1: there's a way, and so people did manage to smuggle
Speaker 1: out some coffee beans and a few tea seeds, and
Speaker 1: so coffee was smuggled from Mocha and planted in the
Speaker 1: Dutch controlled Java around sixteen sixteen. And that was also
Speaker 1: found to be able to grow in many parts of
Speaker 1: the New World which had the right humidity and temperature
Speaker 1: and so on for the growth. And of course, if
Speaker 1: you want to gather a lot of the coffee beans,
Speaker 1: you have to gather them by hand. And what did
Speaker 1: that take was a lot of hands. And so what
Speaker 1: did that lead to but a lot of enslaved people
Speaker 1: being forced to labor under horrific working conditions on all
Speaker 1: these plantations in the New World. And of course, as
Speaker 1: consumption and demand for coffee rows, so did the number
Speaker 1: of enslaved people, and the popular habit of adding sugar
Speaker 1: to coffee and tea ensured that the sugar plantations also
Speaker 1: had a reason to exist.
Speaker 2: Right jeez, Louise capital is.
Speaker 1: And while all this was happening, England was racking up
Speaker 1: a hefty debt to China in the tea trade, and
Speaker 1: so they saw an alternative way to save some money
Speaker 1: and to try to limit how much they were giving
Speaker 1: in terms of like bringing the tea over from there.
Speaker 1: So they were like, well, why don't we get some
Speaker 1: tea seeds and start growing tea plants in our colony
Speaker 1: in India, which was all of India and so Britain
Speaker 1: ruled every India at the time. And so they planted
Speaker 1: tons and tons and tons of tea plants, and they
Speaker 1: hired you know, kind of putting hired in quotes because
Speaker 1: like literally paid them almost nothing in backbreaking conditions. And
Speaker 1: then at the same time they also grew a bunch
Speaker 1: of opium and then smuggled that into China to then
Speaker 1: addict the whole country and drive them into ruin.
Speaker 2: So I had no idea.
Speaker 1: There's a whole separate story of like the Opium Wars
Speaker 1: and like the East India Company is like it's just
Speaker 1: a massive story there. It's really fascinating. But read more
Speaker 1: about it. Well, I don't have the information. But anyway,
Speaker 1: So then tea because of this, because of all of
Speaker 1: the tea that had been able to grow in India,
Speaker 1: that flooded the market back in Britain and it toppled
Speaker 1: coffee as the preferred beverage.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: So then and then that also led to like afternoon
Speaker 1: tea and then eventually tea bags and you know all
Speaker 1: these different cultures around tea and yeah, so anyway, okay,
Speaker 1: So the eighteen hundred saw the continued popularity of these beverages.
Speaker 1: And also eighteen nineteen saw the discovery of the caffeine
Speaker 1: molecule by a young physician named rung Oh.
Speaker 3: Wow, eighteen nineteen, okay.
Speaker 1: And then the next year four other researchers were able
Speaker 1: to isolate the compound. So kind of happened all at once.
Speaker 1: But this discovery did not start the debate on the
Speaker 1: healthy or harmful effects of caffeine, but rather continue it,
Speaker 1: like this debate has been going on for ages and
Speaker 1: still seems to be raging Aaron. I'm sure you'll talk
Speaker 1: about that. Oh yes, And there's just a little bit
Speaker 1: more of the history of caffeine that I want to
Speaker 1: touch on. So caffeine played a huge role in the wars.
Speaker 1: It was during the Civil War, during World War One,
Speaker 1: during World War Two, given to soldiers like unlimited rations
Speaker 1: of caffeine, whether in the form of caffeine powder, whether
Speaker 1: in the form of unlimited tea, whether in the form
Speaker 1: of coca cola, and it often was restricted to try
Speaker 1: to like reduce the morale of whatever opposing side was there.
Speaker 1: For instance, that happened during the American Civil War. And
Speaker 1: then of course the twentieth century saw caffeine in many
Speaker 1: different products, so we see the rise of it in
Speaker 1: SODA's and then energy drinks, and then decaf and then
Speaker 1: advertising wars, leading to basically the consumption and entire world
Speaker 1: addicted to this compound, which is also of course what
Speaker 1: then started a ton and ton and ton of research
Speaker 1: over the safety of caffeine. But you know, this was
Speaker 1: not a very well done history or whole history, but
Speaker 1: hopefully what it has done is given you a little
Speaker 1: bit of the taste of just the massive impact that
Speaker 1: caffeine has had on the world's history and culture. And
Speaker 1: just to like, I want to wrap up a little
Speaker 1: bit by saying, like, there are some parallels between particularly
Speaker 1: coffee and tea, so I just want to find some
Speaker 1: patterns in these histories. So Number one, both of these
Speaker 1: were harvested as a leaf or a berry and used
Speaker 1: as a stimulant or medicine first, and they often held
Speaker 1: great significance for the culture where they were first used.
Speaker 1: Number two. Each was only used as an infused drink
Speaker 1: relatively recently, so maybe starting in the fifteen hundreds. Number three,
Speaker 1: each was brought into the region that they are now
Speaker 1: associated with by religious devotees returning from another country. Number four,
Speaker 1: their cultivation was protected. Number five they were used as currency,
Speaker 1: So coffee beans were used as currency in Arabia, colon
Speaker 1: nuts used this currency in Africa, cacal pods and mante
Speaker 1: leaves in the Americas, and tea leaf bricks in China.
Speaker 1: And I wanted the final point I wanted to make
Speaker 1: is that number six and just as it has always
Speaker 1: been in the present day, the people who were actually
Speaker 1: farming and producing these products. See a minute school fraction
Speaker 1: of the profit that eventually comes out of them. So
Speaker 1: for every ten dollars that you spend on a bag
Speaker 1: of coffee, for instance, the farmer who produced it sees
Speaker 1: maybe a dollar of that. And that's just how it is.
Speaker 1: There are some, you know, programs that seek to remedy
Speaker 1: that or seek to make it a little bit more fair,
Speaker 1: but it's debated whether they actually function. So anyway, that's
Speaker 1: that's my story. Aaron, Please tell us why we are
Speaker 1: so addicted to caffeine and why right now, just talking
Speaker 1: about it makes me want to have a cup of
Speaker 1: tea or an afternoon coffee.
Speaker 2: I was just thinking, do we have decafs?
Speaker 1: I know if I if I did have coffee right now,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't be able to sleep for sure.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, do you guys want to know why?
Speaker 1: Of course I do.
Speaker 3: Let's take a quick break and then I'll talk about it. Excellent, okay, So, Aarin,
Speaker 3: it's very interesting that you use the word addicted, because
Speaker 3: I think a lot of us think of caffeine as
Speaker 3: an addiction. I'm addicted to coffee. I'm addicted to coffee.
Speaker 3: And it's true that caffeine is the most widely used
Speaker 3: by far psychoactive substance drug in the world. I think
Speaker 3: over eighty five percent of Americans, regardless of age, use caffeine.
Speaker 1: Wow wow, right, regardless of age.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so like so for adults it's like a lot
Speaker 3: more than eighty five percent, and hopefully it's less kids.
Speaker 3: But but there's like even but I mean because that
Speaker 3: includes soda, right, and a lot kids drink soda and chocolate.
Speaker 1: Which for a long time, soda companies, namely Coca Cola,
Speaker 1: was like, oh, yeah, we caffeine is a is a
Speaker 1: flavor additive, Like it's required to be there because it's
Speaker 1: a flavor additive. It adds bitterness. But in like double
Speaker 1: blind studies, people couldn't detect the difference, and so it
Speaker 1: was like, are you just doing this to addict to
Speaker 1: the children? To caffeine tep into a whole new market.
Speaker 1: But then there's sugar, so like is that addictive? You
Speaker 1: know whatever?
Speaker 3: Yeah, So there's no like diagnosis of caffeine addiction. And
Speaker 3: so whether or not you consider caffeine to be something
Speaker 3: addictive kind of depends on what the definition of addictive is,
Speaker 3: which is a whole nother debate that I am not
Speaker 3: even going to get in. But it is true that
Speaker 3: caffeine has effects on your nervous system such that with
Speaker 3: habitual use, if you stop using caffeine, you will experience
Speaker 3: things like withdrawal symptoms, and so that means you can
Speaker 3: become dependent on caffeine, which is something that's often part
Speaker 3: of a diagnosis of something like addiction. So let's talk
Speaker 3: a little bit more about the effects of caffeine on
Speaker 3: your brain. Okay, ye, all right, we all drink caffeine.
Speaker 2: Is that correct? Three of us?
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, okay, tell me what it feels like when
Speaker 3: you drink a cup of coffee. What are your symptoms?
Speaker 2: I have to run to the bathroom really quick.
Speaker 3: Okay, thank you for that, honest.
Speaker 2: Now, Euphoria, excitement, heartbeats.
Speaker 1: Go up, okay, alertness. I always feel like I kind
Speaker 1: of have like a beginning period of this feels great
Speaker 1: and awesome, and I'm finally like where I need to
Speaker 1: be in my morning, and then my bones start to
Speaker 1: feel hollow, and I get like, does that not a thing?
Speaker 1: Where I'm like, I feel so like jittery and jittery. Okay,
Speaker 1: But I also.
Speaker 2: Is it?
Speaker 1: Okay? I have so many questions that I'm getting ahead
Speaker 1: of myself. I'm like, but I don't eat breakfast, so
Speaker 1: does that have an impact? You know? But mostly I
Speaker 1: feel like I'm talking right now, which is like a
Speaker 1: mile a minute. My brain's very focused.
Speaker 3: Okay, great, you guys are hitting on a lot of
Speaker 3: the effects of caffeine. Okay. So it's a stimulant, so
Speaker 3: it has an effect on your central nervous system. So
Speaker 3: the reason that it's able to have an effect on
Speaker 3: your CNS is because when you ingest caffeine, generally we
Speaker 3: ingest it orally right, So you drink a cup of coffee,
Speaker 3: or you pop a caffeine pill, or you sip a
Speaker 3: cup of tea, and almost one hundred percent of that
Speaker 3: caffeine becomes bioavailable, so you absorb it through your testin
Speaker 3: and it goes into your bloodstream. Caffeine is a lipophilic molecule,
Speaker 3: so it can pass through lipid membranes, which means it
Speaker 3: can pass through your blood brain barrier and get into
Speaker 3: your central nervous system right away. And within like an
Speaker 3: hour of consuming caffeine, your blood levels and your plasma
Speaker 3: levels are almost equivalent, so it kind of like distributes
Speaker 3: equally throughout your tissues, including your brain. Okay, so we
Speaker 3: know that it's overall going to keep you awake, and
Speaker 3: now we know that it can get into your brain,
Speaker 3: so it's going to have some effect there. But the
Speaker 3: question is really like what is it doing on a
Speaker 3: molecular level? And this is really fun and I'm going
Speaker 3: to keep it really pretty simple and basic because there's
Speaker 3: a lot of nitty gritty biochem here that I just
Speaker 3: I don't have enough caffeine in me to get into
Speaker 3: that nitty gritty detail. So what we need to know
Speaker 3: is that depending on the concentration of caffeine when we
Speaker 3: look in like cell culture studies or animal model studies,
Speaker 3: we know that it can have a lot of different
Speaker 3: effects on cells, right, Like, it interacts with cells and
Speaker 3: can cause a lot of different things when you look
Speaker 3: at them in an animal. But when you ingest it
Speaker 3: like you're drinking a cup of coffee, the amount that
Speaker 3: you would ingest with that there's really only one main
Speaker 3: receptor that caffeine is going to interact with, and that
Speaker 3: is with the adenazine receptors. So adenazine might sound familiar.
Speaker 3: Does it sound familiar to you, guys? Why does it
Speaker 3: sound familiar? Atp ATP so adenozine triphosphate or ATP is
Speaker 3: like the energy of all of our cells. Okay, So
Speaker 3: when your cells use a bunch of energy, like your brain.
Speaker 3: For example, if your brain is working really hard because
Speaker 3: you're or your muscles are working hard because they're contracting,
Speaker 3: they use up ATP, and in using up ATP, they
Speaker 3: release or create Essentially by taking off phosphate, they release
Speaker 3: a denazine, which is the adnizine part of adenizine tryphosphate ATP.
Speaker 3: When adenizine levels in your brain become high, they bind
Speaker 3: to a number of different adenizine receptors. There's a bunch
Speaker 3: of different subtypes and they basically cause you to become
Speaker 3: sleepy because if you think about it, if your brain
Speaker 3: is working hard and using up a bunch of energy,
Speaker 3: then your brain probably needs a rest. Right, So by
Speaker 3: using up ATP, you increase the levels of adnazine, which
Speaker 3: tells your brain by binding to these receptors, hey I'm tired,
Speaker 3: I need a rest, Let's take a break.
Speaker 1: Hum, Okay, which is why at the end of the day,
Speaker 1: that build up makes you fall asleep and you get
Speaker 1: that sleepy at the end.
Speaker 3: If not, the only thing sleep is more complicated than that,
Speaker 3: but that's one. That's one thing. Okay. So yes, So caffeine,
Speaker 3: as it turns out, is an antagonist of adentizine receptors,
Speaker 3: which means it blocks adentizine receptors. So if it blocks
Speaker 3: the thing that makes you sleepy, it makes you feel awake.
Speaker 2: Amazing question.
Speaker 1: Okay, So wait, if you plotted the adenizine throughout the
Speaker 1: day and like starting in the morning of like an
Speaker 1: average day, or you did this and you averaged it
Speaker 1: or whatever in the morning, would it also be high
Speaker 1: because you're just waking up and you're not quite there? Like,
Speaker 1: why does it? Why does caffeine make you wake up
Speaker 1: in the morning? Like I could see why it would
Speaker 1: throughout the day make you feel more awake as it
Speaker 1: blocked those receptors, But why in the morning does it help?
Speaker 3: Great question? So I don't fully know the answer to that.
Speaker 3: I don't know. Maybe there's just a dentizine like leftover
Speaker 3: residual or if just by blocking those receptors you prevent
Speaker 3: any adentizine from binding. But I have seen some studies
Speaker 3: that suggest that caffeine has greater effects if you're already
Speaker 3: a little drowsy right, So if you're already tired and
Speaker 3: then you drink caffeine, it has greater effects. When they've
Speaker 3: done trials of like how alert are you, what's your
Speaker 3: response time? Things like that, the effects are greater if
Speaker 3: you're already drowsy rather than if you're already alert, if
Speaker 3: that makes sense.
Speaker 1: So there's like a maximum alertness almost and then so
Speaker 1: like to get back to that maximum, you have to
Speaker 1: be a little bit like coffee will help you get
Speaker 1: to there.
Speaker 3: I don't know, it's a little it's complicated, and this
Speaker 3: is just the basics.
Speaker 2: It makes sense though, because I feel like any more today,
Speaker 2: caffeine in the morning just kind of levels me, whereas
Speaker 2: caffeine at like two pm floors me. I'm like, oh,
Speaker 2: let's get this done.
Speaker 3: So another interesting point is that remember I said you
Speaker 3: can become dependent where you can have withdrawal symptoms. When
Speaker 3: you are a habitual user of caffeine, your body actually
Speaker 3: upregulates the number of a dentisine receptors so that a
Speaker 3: dentosine can still bind, so that caffeine is actually less effective,
Speaker 3: which we see with so many different compounds, where you
Speaker 3: basically like create tolerance to it. Your body finds a
Speaker 3: way to get around this drug that you're giving it.
Speaker 1: Right, how long does it take to build a dependence
Speaker 1: or like to actually see those physiological long term changes.
Speaker 3: Not very long, because you can have withdrawal symptoms after
Speaker 3: just maybe like three or four days of chronic caffeine use.
Speaker 3: But it usually only takes forty eight hours to go
Speaker 3: through withdrawals, but for some people it can take up
Speaker 3: to like nine days. It's very Caffeine's another thing that
Speaker 3: like the effects of caffeine are very greatly depending on
Speaker 3: like interpersonal differences in metabolism and things like that. So
Speaker 3: there's a huge amount of variation in like the effect
Speaker 3: that a single cup of coffee is going to have
Speaker 3: on any given individual.
Speaker 1: I have a question, Oh gosh, okay, okay, So in
Speaker 1: terms of talking about withdrawal, why do we see some
Speaker 1: of the symptoms we see, like when you have let's
Speaker 1: if you have those the excess of receptors, like I
Speaker 1: could see how you'd be sleepier than normal, ord be
Speaker 1: more difficult to wake up. But why do I get
Speaker 1: a massive headache and I feel like killing everyone around me?
Speaker 2: Great question?
Speaker 3: Okay, so let's talk about some of the other effects
Speaker 3: of caffeine to be able to understand that things. I'm
Speaker 3: very excited, that's perfect, okay. So the alertness and awakeness
Speaker 3: that aspect, right, it's like hypervigilance, increased alertness, which leads
Speaker 3: to things like faster response time, better driving. Okay, if
Speaker 3: you're sleepy, caffeine does make you a better driver or
Speaker 3: things like that. Those we can kind of all explain
Speaker 3: from the whole adnozine receptor thing. But that's not the
Speaker 3: only place that we have a dentosine receptors. Is not
Speaker 3: just in those parts of our brain that have to
Speaker 3: do with sleepiness, Okay. Adnazine has a lot of other
Speaker 3: effects on our body. For example, there are adentisine receptors
Speaker 3: in our heart that block electric signaling in our heart. So,
Speaker 3: for example, if someone in the hospital has what we
Speaker 3: call a superventricular tachycardia, so their heart is beating way, way,
Speaker 3: way way too fast and out of proper rhythm. You
Speaker 3: give them a denazine. It blocks all electric conduction to
Speaker 3: their heart, stops their heart for a split second, and
Speaker 3: then they can restart in normal sinus rhythm. So if
Speaker 3: adnazine can stop and slow your heart rate, what do
Speaker 3: you think caffeine can do if it blocks those receptors,
Speaker 3: increase that heart rate. Yeah, okay, so that's an effect
Speaker 3: that you mentioned, Matt, Right, you feel your heart rate. Okay,
Speaker 3: So headaches adnozine has also effects not just on your heart,
Speaker 3: but on your vasculature. In your brain, A denozine can
Speaker 3: help vasodilate vessels to your brain, while in your peripheral
Speaker 3: blood vessels it causes vasoconstriction. Don't ask me the details,
Speaker 3: please why and it does do that?
Speaker 2: That was my next question. Details.
Speaker 3: So caffeine does the opposite. Caffeine causes vasoconstriction of your
Speaker 3: cerebral blood vessels to your brain and vasodilation of your
Speaker 3: peripheral blood vessels. Vasoconstriction is what a lot of headache
Speaker 3: medications do because a lot of headaches are caused by
Speaker 3: vasodilation increased pressure in your brain right from too much
Speaker 3: blood flowing there. So if you have caffeine and can
Speaker 3: vasoconstrict those blood vessels, caffeine is really helpful, and it's
Speaker 3: in a lot of headache medication, right, Like, uh, what
Speaker 3: do you call that stuff?
Speaker 1: Et cetera.
Speaker 3: Yeah, right, And there's been a lot of studies that
Speaker 3: show like en sids with caffeine are more effective than
Speaker 3: en sids alone for a lot of headaches. But on
Speaker 3: the flip side, if you then take away that caffeine
Speaker 3: that your brain is used to having, you're gonna have
Speaker 3: increased blood flow to that brain. You're gonna have a headache.
Speaker 1: Bone.
Speaker 3: Wow, that's pretty fun, right.
Speaker 1: What about my hollow bones?
Speaker 3: Your hollow bones?
Speaker 2: Okay, your bird stop it.
Speaker 3: So I'm not sure this can fully explain the hollow
Speaker 3: bones necessarily, but the jitteriness Okay, so this one's really fun.
Speaker 3: A denizine in your brain also has interactions with dopamine
Speaker 3: receptors and dopamine release. Okay, we've talked about dopamine a
Speaker 3: number of times on the podcast, but dopamine is really
Speaker 3: important both in mood, So more dopamine usually means more happier,
Speaker 3: but too much dopamine can also mean like psychosis, so
Speaker 3: we think that things like schizophrenia have to do with
Speaker 3: too much dopamine. Okay, wow, But dopamine is also really
Speaker 3: important in motor control. Right. So Parkinson's, for example, is
Speaker 3: a problem where your basal ganglia doesn't produce dopamine properly
Speaker 3: or doesn't respond to dopamine properly, so you end up
Speaker 3: with slow movement and arresting tremor. Okay, So a denazine
Speaker 3: normally is an antagonist of dopamine, so it blocks the
Speaker 3: release of dopamine. Caffeine is an antagonist of a denazine,
Speaker 3: so it increases the release of dopamine, so it can
Speaker 3: cause those like tremors. It can increase muscle contraction. So
Speaker 3: maybe that's part of it for you, Aaron and your
Speaker 3: holow bone. It's why some people think that caffeine is
Speaker 3: a performance enhancer in general, right, Like for athletic events,
Speaker 3: people used to use caffeine. They still do, I'm sure
Speaker 3: for like it's gonna make me run faster. There's not
Speaker 3: a ton of data that says it actually does. It
Speaker 3: really just delays exhaustion most likely. But you know, give
Speaker 3: it to them if it makes them feel good.
Speaker 2: I'm calling the Olympics. That's a performance enhancing drug.
Speaker 3: You know, there used to be limits on how much
Speaker 3: caffeine you could have in your bloodstream as an Olympic athlete.
Speaker 1: Uh huh, how much could you have? Like what was.
Speaker 3: That's like a question for you.
Speaker 1: History. Oh, that's that's so fascinating and it makes so
Speaker 1: much sense.
Speaker 3: And it also can kind of get at Matt, why
Speaker 3: you said caffeine makes you feel happy? Right. Caffeine can
Speaker 3: also increase serotonin levels in your brain, so some people
Speaker 3: think that it can maybe help with depression. There's not
Speaker 3: a ton of great evidence for that because we've kind
Speaker 3: of already talked about a lot of these symptoms heart palpitations,
Speaker 3: you know, feeling like you're jittery. That sounds a lot
Speaker 3: like an anxiety. Yes, so caffeine can actually exacerbate anxiety,
Speaker 3: especially in people who already have anxiety or who are
Speaker 3: prone to panic attacks.
Speaker 2: I've I've definitely had periods of my life where I've
Speaker 2: had to avoid it for that reason. And that's what
Speaker 2: when you were going through the history, I was like,
Speaker 2: I want to meet the first person to overdo it
Speaker 2: on coffee.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, somebody I can't remember who it was used to drink.
Speaker 1: This isn't coffee, but they would drink around fifty cups
Speaker 1: of hot chocolate a day.
Speaker 3: Nope, Oh bad idea.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, I just got an indigestion thinking about that.
Speaker 1: Speaking of why does coffee make you poop?
Speaker 3: Okay?
Speaker 2: Please tell me no poop and pee.
Speaker 3: Right, So people say caffeine's diuretic. It makes you pee,
Speaker 3: and it makes you poop. I saw some things that
Speaker 3: suggest that maybe it can have some like pro motility
Speaker 3: effects on your bowels, but in general, my understanding is
Speaker 3: that that's mostly a timing association. Most people poop in
Speaker 3: the morning. Most people have coffee in the morning. You know,
Speaker 3: anytime you eat something that's gonna kind of wake your
Speaker 3: bowels up, get them moving, so then you can have
Speaker 3: a poop. The diuretic effect so making you pee. There
Speaker 3: is some evidence that at like very high levels, there
Speaker 3: might be some diuresis from caffeine ingestion, but in general,
Speaker 3: especially at levels that you would consume normally, it's really
Speaker 3: it's a negligible effect. So it's really like, are you
Speaker 3: drinking a liquid then you'll have to pee.
Speaker 2: So the whole thing about like coffee dehydrating the heck
Speaker 2: out of you is probably blown out of proportion.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think it's it again with the tolerance thing.
Speaker 3: If you never drink caffeine ever, then maybe it might
Speaker 3: have a little bit more of a diuretic effect than
Speaker 3: if you drink coffee regularly. But in general, it doesn't
Speaker 3: really have as strong of a diuretic effect as we
Speaker 3: used to think.
Speaker 1: Man, I am shocked about it not having a direct
Speaker 1: link to pooping.
Speaker 3: Yeah, there was only like one paper that I saw
Speaker 3: that even mentioned its effects on GI. So I don't
Speaker 3: even know, like how real. I think it's largely timing.
Speaker 3: You know, you eat something, you drink something that wakes
Speaker 3: up your bowels like you. So, even coffee has calories, right,
Speaker 3: and it's it's it's sending the signals to your stomach.
Speaker 3: It's sent it's activating those stretch receptors. It's it's got
Speaker 3: amino acids, it's.
Speaker 1: Got I thought coffee didn't have calories.
Speaker 3: But it has stuff in there, right, It's not just
Speaker 3: like drinking water. Right, there's I don't know what coffee oils,
Speaker 3: no acids, other compounds that are going to stimulate your
Speaker 3: plus also you drink it with half and half aarin.
Speaker 2: Sometimes it's also it's got to be negligible because all
Speaker 2: like the fasting intermittent fasting stuff is like Coffee's fine,
Speaker 2: don't worry about coffee.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's true. Yeah, Oh you want to know a
Speaker 3: fun side note use of caffeine. I learned this while researching.
Speaker 3: I think it's fascinating. Caffeine is used in premature newborns
Speaker 3: to help prevent apnea, so like to make them breathe better,
Speaker 3: essentially because it helps your diaphragm, It helps their diaphragm
Speaker 3: to be more active and prevent complications from not breathing properly.
Speaker 3: So not just caffeine, but another So caffeine is in
Speaker 3: a class of compounds called methyl xantheenes, and there's another
Speaker 3: methyl xanthine that we actually use to treat asthma, called
Speaker 3: theophilin interesting.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's amazing, I know.
Speaker 1: So one of the things that I was always told
Speaker 1: growing up, because I loved coffee as a kid, was
Speaker 1: that it would stunt my growth. And then I grew
Speaker 1: up to be the shortest by far of everyone in
Speaker 1: my family, and so I've always was it.
Speaker 3: That's it, Aaron, No, it's just bad luck.
Speaker 1: There's life, my excuse me. Oh sorry, Wow.
Speaker 2: Your genes are terrible and you have coffee to fight.
Speaker 3: There's no association with a short stature and caffeine intake.
Speaker 1: Okay, what about any of the other studies. Has there
Speaker 1: been any association between caffeine intake and negative outcome in
Speaker 1: anything or any positive outcome.
Speaker 3: So there's been a lot of talk about whether it
Speaker 3: has effects on your cardiovascular disease or increased risk of
Speaker 3: death from cardiovascular disease. There's not really an association there.
Speaker 3: There's some people that say it can increase your blood pressure,
Speaker 3: which for someone who never drinks caffeine, if they drink caffeine,
Speaker 3: you can see maybe like a ten point bump in
Speaker 3: their blood pressure transiently. But if you drink caffeine regularly,
Speaker 3: it has pretty negligible effects overall on your blood pressure.
Speaker 3: Basically all the things that we used to think caffeine
Speaker 3: is just so terrible. It has all these negative effects,
Speaker 3: it doesn't actually have a lot of association a lot
Speaker 3: of the studies that used to show it, because the
Speaker 3: problem with caffeine is that most of our studies about
Speaker 3: caffeine are coffee drinkers, right, which means they're dietary studies,
Speaker 3: which means they're really hard to do. There's a lot
Speaker 3: of different ways you can end up with biases like
Speaker 3: recall bias, but then there's also a lot of interactions
Speaker 3: in terms of who drinks coffee. So in some cases
Speaker 3: it's actually people who are generally healthier that are drinking
Speaker 3: more coffee because they have access to it and they
Speaker 3: can afford it. But on the flip side, there's also
Speaker 3: associations with things like smoking and increased coffee drink if
Speaker 3: you think about going out for a smoke break and
Speaker 3: a cup of coffee, et cetera. And so in the past,
Speaker 3: a lot of studies have kind of confounded especially the
Speaker 3: effects of cigarette smoking and coffee drinking, which is why
Speaker 3: for a while, I think a lot of it was
Speaker 3: like coffee's terrible for you, and then it was like
Speaker 3: coffee will save you. And now it's kind of just like,
Speaker 3: if coffee makes you feel more awake, then have some coffee.
Speaker 1: What about the sleep impacts.
Speaker 3: So caffeine increases your sleep latency, which means it takes
Speaker 3: you longer to be able to fall asleep, and subjectively,
Speaker 3: people say that after drinking caffeine they feel less rested
Speaker 3: when they wake up, so they say that it interferes
Speaker 3: with their quality of their sleep. In terms of how
Speaker 3: long the effects of caffeine last in your body, it
Speaker 3: can vary quite a lot, but on average the half
Speaker 3: life is like three to seven hours, so if you
Speaker 3: drink a cup of coffee in the morning, it should
Speaker 3: be well gone by the time you get to bedtime.
Speaker 3: But if you have a cup of coffee at like
Speaker 3: four in the afternoon, then yeah, you'll probably have still
Speaker 3: like half of that in your bloodstream by the time
Speaker 3: you go to bed.
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, my cutoff is three.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, my cutoff is like ten am.
Speaker 3: I chug like a triple espresso and fall asleep right after.
Speaker 3: And that's the thing. There's a lot, Yeah, there is
Speaker 3: a lot of variation, individual variation in the metabolism of caffeine.
Speaker 3: And then of course there's tolerance effects on top of
Speaker 3: all that.
Speaker 1: So I think it's it is interesting, like there's still
Speaker 1: this association that we have with like, oh, I'm I'm
Speaker 1: giving up caffeine. It's like a very puritanical kind of like, yeah,
Speaker 1: glimpse of like this thing that you know.
Speaker 3: Other thing i'd like to say, because I get this
Speaker 3: question a lot from like lens caffeine and pregnancy. For
Speaker 3: a long time, it was like, no, you can't have
Speaker 3: caffeine if you're pregnant. There's been really no good studies
Speaker 3: that show that small amounts of coffee like up to
Speaker 3: three hundred milligrams of caffeine, which is about like three
Speaker 3: two to three cups depending on what size your cup is,
Speaker 3: don't really have any effects adverse effects on fetus or
Speaker 3: mom or anything. So yeah. So, however, in the third
Speaker 3: trimester of pregnancy, the half life of caffeine is increased
Speaker 3: quite a lot longer, which is super interesting, and in
Speaker 3: newborns it's super long, like eighty hours. It can be
Speaker 3: where caffeine like, that's the half life for caffeine, which
Speaker 3: is so interesting. Don't ask me why. Livers ooh man.
Speaker 1: I've also read that taking oral contraceptives increases the half
Speaker 1: life of caffeine in the body.
Speaker 3: It makes sense because the so caffeine is metabolized by
Speaker 3: your liver, and oral contraceptives, especially ones with estrogen, are
Speaker 3: going to also have a lot of interactions with your
Speaker 3: liver and with the enzymes that potentially metabolize caffeine. So
Speaker 3: I don't know for sure, but I wouldn't be surprised
Speaker 3: if that's why your half life of caffeine increases in
Speaker 3: third trimester pregnancy when your hormones are going wild.
Speaker 2: Interesting, that's wild.
Speaker 3: That was fun, guys. I'm glad you asked me some
Speaker 3: many questions because my notes were not organized. But I
Speaker 3: feel like that was fun.
Speaker 1: I got over eager and I couldn't start learning.
Speaker 2: And what's amazing is how much of this I've just
Speaker 2: kind of taken with me and like held on, like, oh,
Speaker 2: this is what caffeine to never realized how on the
Speaker 2: fence at best. Some of this is.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, And it's also I will say, it's really
Speaker 3: really difficult too, because a lot of our data about
Speaker 3: caffeine comes from studies on coffee, and coffee is not
Speaker 3: just caffeine. There's so many other compounds in coffee beans,
Speaker 3: there's so many other compounds in tea leaves that are
Speaker 3: different from coffee beans. So it is really difficult to
Speaker 3: fully get a handle on the exact effects of caffeine
Speaker 3: per se on these various processes. So Matt, can you
Speaker 3: please tell us why on earth would plants make such
Speaker 3: a substance and what is it good for? Irl?
Speaker 2: Amazing question. I'm so happy to be here to talk
Speaker 2: about this.
Speaker 3: We'll take a quick break and then I want you
Speaker 3: to tell us all about it.
Speaker 1: Okay, great, Matt, that's with the good stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yes, So yet another fascinating dive down the literature
Speaker 2: hole on this one, and it was never as simple
Speaker 2: as I ever expected to be. So thank you again
Speaker 2: for forcing me to look at this, especially considering how
Speaker 2: dependent we'll say I am on this product. So, as
Speaker 2: Aaron established in the beginning, more than just coffee produces caffeine.
Speaker 2: I keep seeing this number around sixty different species tossed around,
Speaker 2: but I did that whole web of science thing and
Speaker 2: traced it back, and it's just something that someone through
Speaker 2: out there they cited like a vascular flora of the tropics,
Speaker 2: and just kind of picked it out. And basically what
Speaker 2: we're gonna come down to you here is that certainly
Speaker 2: far more plants than just sixty species do this. But
Speaker 2: we generally only tend to look at things that interest
Speaker 2: or have it used to us in some way, so food, drink, medicine, caffeine, tea, chocolate,
Speaker 2: that sort of stuff. But again, as we've established, some
Speaker 2: of the most prominent ones are very familiar to us.
Speaker 2: So the genus Coffea, which is the coffee plant, and
Speaker 2: all of its relatives, theobroma which is chocolate citrus, actually
Speaker 2: produces a fair amount of caffeine. Camellia, which is the
Speaker 2: genus for Tea cola, which is the genus for the
Speaker 2: cola tree, which has gone on to give us a
Speaker 2: lot of soft drink flavoring. I see a hand raised here.
Speaker 3: Yep, sorry, does that mean like oranges.
Speaker 2: Not within the orange itself. We'll circle back to that though,
Speaker 2: but yes, yeah, all citrus do this on some level. Okay,
Speaker 2: So guarana, which is the genus Pollinia, and you'll notice
Speaker 2: guarana is a common ingredient within a lot of energy drinks,
Speaker 2: because there's other compounds related to caffeine that have stimulatory effects.
Speaker 2: And then a lot of Holly's, which if you've ever
Speaker 2: drank you've both been in Central America, you're but mate,
Speaker 2: which comes from a halley. So there's other again, other
Speaker 2: stimulants within that, but caffeine is a major component of it.
Speaker 2: And so those are just the ones that have economic
Speaker 2: use to us and that we study the most. But again,
Speaker 2: this is something that's prevalent in a lot of different
Speaker 2: plant families and within those a lot of different species,
Speaker 2: which is amazing and the coolest part about it is
Speaker 2: that there is actually more than one way to synthesize caffeine.
Speaker 2: If you're a plant, all of it involves alkaloid chemistry,
Speaker 2: which caffeine is a type of alkaloid, and it tends
Speaker 2: to rely on, as with any alkaloid production, high nitrogen
Speaker 2: in the soil. So you generally will find these sorts
Speaker 2: of species in rich soils because you need a lot
Speaker 2: of nitrogen to build alkaloids. And that's kind of cool.
Speaker 2: You can look at something about the habitat that has
Speaker 2: allowed the evolution or at least selection to work on
Speaker 2: the evolution of these compounds. So the question then becomes,
Speaker 2: why is it there? Nothing in nature is done wastefully.
Speaker 2: There's always some sort of function in there. Well, it
Speaker 2: just so happens that researchers at the University of Buffalo,
Speaker 2: which is mi alma mater, we're studying the genus coffee,
Speaker 2: and they found that there are multiple genes involved in
Speaker 2: the synthesis of caffeine and that they did not arise
Speaker 2: all at once. What. Yeah, So genes duplicate a lot
Speaker 2: in the plant world. It is not nearly as detrimental
Speaker 2: to have ploity events in plants as it is most animals.
Speaker 2: I would assume, at least on the vertebrate spectrum of things.
Speaker 2: So ploidy is essentially a copying or duplication of the chromosomes.
Speaker 2: So you can have diploidy, which means there's double the
Speaker 2: amount of chromosomes, triploidy and so forth, and that's really
Speaker 2: common in plants, and it's a very important way in
Speaker 2: which plants evolve and specie and you go about doing
Speaker 2: all the amazing chemistry that they do. And within just
Speaker 2: coffee alone, the genus Caffea, the genes that are involved
Speaker 2: in the production of caffeine have duplicated multiple times throughout
Speaker 2: the history of this genus. And what's amazing is that,
Speaker 2: like in the creation, it's literature that the propaganda that
Speaker 2: goes out they use this to say, there's no way
Speaker 2: this could have happened, because every step in the way
Speaker 2: is important. You can't have this irreducibly complex system without
Speaker 2: there being a creator. But when you actually look at
Speaker 2: every step, every gene duplication, every mutation that led to
Speaker 2: the process, every compound that is the end result of
Speaker 2: that has a function for the plant. It is always bitter,
Speaker 2: and it's always stored in an area in which will
Speaker 2: prevent herbivery. I guess, and so every every step of
Speaker 2: the way, every precursor compound is bitter and toxic to
Speaker 2: the exact kind of animals that want to nibble on
Speaker 2: these plants.
Speaker 1: It's beautiful, it's.
Speaker 2: It's mind blowing just to kind of see, how like,
Speaker 2: and you look at these papers and you do see
Speaker 2: these chemical I just like looking at them. I don't
Speaker 2: understand them to save my life, but it is amazing
Speaker 2: that every one of these compounds, every step of the
Speaker 2: process has an anti herbivery fun which brings us to
Speaker 2: the main function of caffeine for plants. The primary function
Speaker 2: or role that it's playing is against as a defense
Speaker 2: against herbivy and pathogens, which shouldn't surprise you. So many
Speaker 2: of the chemicals within the plant world that we like
Speaker 2: to utilize have their origins and keeping something from attacking
Speaker 2: or eating them. And so, as Aaron already mentioned, there's
Speaker 2: a lot of methyls anthenes. And the way that they've
Speaker 2: kind of come to this conclusion is that they're able
Speaker 2: to kind of turn these genes on, or at least
Speaker 2: insert them into crop species like beats that don't normally
Speaker 2: produce caffeine, and every time they induce caffeine production in
Speaker 2: a crop species, it has significantly less herbivaly than their relatives,
Speaker 2: the clones that do not have caffeine production.
Speaker 1: So yeah, are they inserted in? Like is that one
Speaker 1: of the strategies to create like you know as like
Speaker 1: a natural pesticide GMO pesticide plant it.
Speaker 2: That is totally the motivation for doing this. I think
Speaker 2: the complication then becomes is keeping it from being expressed
Speaker 2: in tissues. You don't want it, So I don't want
Speaker 2: to beat that's going to keep me up all night, right,
Speaker 2: and so it's a cheap way to study this. But
Speaker 2: in terms of the motivation behind a lot of these studies,
Speaker 2: it is trying to figure out how to get say
Speaker 2: follier genes to express caffeine production as a quick and
Speaker 2: easy way because even at low concentrations that you would
Speaker 2: find in nature, these have a pesticidal effect, which is
Speaker 2: pretty cool. Like, even at low doses, it's keeping these
Speaker 2: things from being eaten.
Speaker 1: Wow, So caffeine is in so many different plant species
Speaker 1: all over the tropics naturally, like, so does that mean
Speaker 1: that it evolved separately or into like in these convergent
Speaker 1: evolution basically events is caffeine like a simple molecule or
Speaker 1: like a relatively simple molecule that it had, Like why caffeine?
Speaker 1: Like why like why that one particular compound? You know
Speaker 1: what I mean? Do you know what I'm asking?
Speaker 2: No great question? Yeah, yeah, and so yes to answer
Speaker 2: your question, it is independent evolution. I mean even if
Speaker 2: we just look at the families that we have listed already,
Speaker 2: Caffeine or coffee is in ruby ac. We have chocolate
Speaker 2: which is now malvasy, it's a mallow. We have the
Speaker 2: Holly's which is aqua fully acy. They're their own family
Speaker 2: we have. You know, it's widespread and independent in terms
Speaker 2: of the complexity. I think it's a pretty complex molecule.
Speaker 2: And I think it's one of those things that just
Speaker 2: as evolution is working, as selection against our bivery works
Speaker 2: on it. You just have instances where it's either you
Speaker 2: just have some sort of byproduct where a mutation leads
Speaker 2: to it and it just happens to be more bitter,
Speaker 2: And I think it's sort of selection against. You know,
Speaker 2: insects are really good at acclimating and evolving. That's is
Speaker 2: that evolutionary arms, right, This is why we have so
Speaker 2: many chemical pesticides within the plant community. It's just because
Speaker 2: insects are really good at adapting because their generation times
Speaker 2: are so low. So I think it's a complex molecule,
Speaker 2: and I think it's one of those things that just
Speaker 2: kind of gets refined depending on the selection pressures of
Speaker 2: that given environment, and of course anything that's valuable to us,
Speaker 2: and especially in terms of you know, things that are tasty,
Speaker 2: we breed it to do way more than it normally
Speaker 2: would in the wild. Which I have a really cool
Speaker 2: episode that's involving THHD coming out soon, which has similar
Speaker 2: conclusions in terms of our use versus natural background.
Speaker 3: Interesting, Yeah, that sounds like a fun episode.
Speaker 2: It is, and I'm really excited for it. But yeah,
Speaker 2: so at lower const at lower concentrations, these methyls anthems,
Speaker 2: as Aaron already pointed out, are really good pesticides and
Speaker 2: they activate something within the insects which I actually wanted
Speaker 2: to ask Aaron about. This is the identilate cyclase they
Speaker 2: activate that they made that they put that out there
Speaker 2: and we're just like, of course it does that, And
Speaker 2: I was like, what.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's the getting into the biochemistry of things that
Speaker 3: I'm not going to get into. But like denizene receptors.
Speaker 3: Some of them increase cyclic amp, some of them decrease
Speaker 3: cyclic amp, so then caffeine. So it's all basically the
Speaker 3: same general compounds that it's going to effect in insects
Speaker 3: versus humans and other mammals, if that makes sense, Like
Speaker 3: on a biomolecular level, it's the same basic stuff.
Speaker 2: Cool, So apparently it works that way, But again, plants
Speaker 2: have many ways in which they can defend themselves, and
Speaker 2: there's mechanical defenses which are like the thorns and spines
Speaker 2: that you grab a rose, you pay for it royally,
Speaker 2: But it's also just having tough tissues. And what's cool
Speaker 2: is that in early development of leaves and stems and stuff,
Speaker 2: caffeine production is super high. But as the leaves mature
Speaker 2: and become more tough, they you know, kind of reinforce
Speaker 2: their cell membranes, caffeine production actually goes down, which is
Speaker 2: why actually younger tea leaves are preferred. They have a
Speaker 2: higher because they're softer and more vulnerable. They need the
Speaker 2: chemical defenses before they can beef up their structural defenses,
Speaker 2: which if you think in terms of investment in defenses,
Speaker 2: making lots of chemicals is expensive, whereas just using and
Speaker 2: reinforcing that lasts a lot longer. Oh, which is really cool.
Speaker 1: Oh cool, that's really amazing.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Okay, So caffeine is in the seedlings really early on,
Speaker 2: because again it's like those mechanical defenses. The seeds are small,
Speaker 2: they're really vulnerable to herbivora's smaller stuff, especially like slugs
Speaker 2: and everything that wants to eat a small tender seedling.
Speaker 2: So caffeine production for about the first eight weeks is
Speaker 2: super super high, and then it eventually starts to decline,
Speaker 2: just like we see in leaves throughout the germination process.
Speaker 2: And so as long as the seeds are small and
Speaker 2: have this uniform soft tissue, this accumulation of caffeine is
Speaker 2: just going to continue to increase, which is pretty amazing.
Speaker 2: But as soon as the seeds start to toughen up,
Speaker 2: that's when you start to see that decline, which again
Speaker 2: goes back to this idea that nothing is being done
Speaker 2: in sort of a wasteful sense, and that a lot
Speaker 2: of these productions of chemicals, any chemical compound within a plant,
Speaker 2: is it can either be inducible or it's really during
Speaker 2: a short period of time of development because they're not
Speaker 2: doing this for us. They're not doing it because we
Speaker 2: want them to. They're doing it to protect themselves. And
Speaker 2: within plants like tea, there's also a shift you'll see
Speaker 2: in sort of where the caffeine's being stored. So once
Speaker 2: those tea leaves really start to toughen up, they start
Speaker 2: really packing it into their vacuoles, which whenever an insect
Speaker 2: bites into it, those burst and that gets into their
Speaker 2: mouth and that's where you start to see again that
Speaker 2: sort of protection effect where it's just like, oh God,
Speaker 2: this is disgusting. I got to stop eating it. But
Speaker 2: they also put it into their vascular bundles, which is
Speaker 2: the vascular tissue throughout the plant, and that's one of
Speaker 2: the main conduits by which pathoenogenic fungi will attack. And
Speaker 2: any organic gardener knows that a lot of antimicrobial properties
Speaker 2: are within coffee grounds as long as you haven't boiled them,
Speaker 2: and so there's also a big component of keeping microbial
Speaker 2: pathogens a way, so it's not just herbivy protecting against
Speaker 2: fungal attacks as well. But that's cool because it's also
Speaker 2: kind of funneling it to the areas of the plant
Speaker 2: that are most vulnerable.
Speaker 1: That's super cool.
Speaker 3: Plants are so smart.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: So if the caffeine molecules act on insects in similar
Speaker 1: ways as they do on humans, why And I don't
Speaker 1: know who I'm directing this question towards or whom I'm
Speaker 1: directing this question towards, But why do humans become dependent
Speaker 1: and want more caffeine and insects are like eh? Because
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously we like the bitterness, and there is
Speaker 1: obviously bitter taste, and it's evolutionarily wise, I'll say, just
Speaker 1: for lack of vocabulary at this point in the day
Speaker 1: to avoid the taste of bitter things because it tends
Speaker 1: to be you know, poisonous or toxic. But why are
Speaker 1: there insects or animals in general that like caffeine?
Speaker 2: Hmmm, that's a really good question. And I so, for instance,
Speaker 2: if this was alcohol, I would say, yeah, there's tons
Speaker 2: of evidence that animals are seeking it out and having
Speaker 2: similar issues with alcohol that even humans have for caffeine.
Speaker 2: I don't know. I don't think so, although there is
Speaker 2: this evidence of like you know that we talked about
Speaker 2: the civets having to pass the beans and making the
Speaker 2: best cup of coffee, So I would say potentially, but
Speaker 2: that's a mammal of a larger body mass I would assume,
Speaker 2: you know, for as like anxiety written as I can
Speaker 2: be after like two or three cups of coffee, a
Speaker 2: few bites on a leaf for an insect is probably
Speaker 2: really rough for that body mass.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, And I don't I don't want to say
Speaker 3: like that the effects of caffeine are the same in
Speaker 3: an insect as they are in a human. I just mean,
Speaker 3: like on a molecular level, right, the like changes are
Speaker 3: probably going to be similar, but right, right, right, the
Speaker 3: mechanism of effect, right, Yeah, But that's it's a really
Speaker 3: interesting question.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I would be really curious to look at even
Speaker 2: just because you have to figure like those coffee seeds
Speaker 2: have to go somewhere, right, and the dispersals usually and
Speaker 2: especially if it's a red berry aided by some sort
Speaker 2: of animal, And so I wonder if caffeine, which will
Speaker 2: actually get to in a little bit here some other
Speaker 2: ways that maybe caffeine could work for animals and plants together.
Speaker 2: But first I want to talk to you about competition,
Speaker 2: because everyone thinks about plants as sort of the static
Speaker 2: not really interacting with the world kind of organisms, and
Speaker 2: especially not harming each other or working against each other.
Speaker 2: You know, the World Wide Web stuff came out Kumbaya,
Speaker 2: everything's getting along well. Actually, plants aren't competing all the time.
Speaker 2: That's the only reason we have tall plants at all
Speaker 2: is because they can shade each other out. They take
Speaker 2: up space where other roots could go. They're competing for nutrients, water,
Speaker 2: all of that sort of stuff. And so it makes
Speaker 2: sense that at some point anti competition mechanisms would evolve
Speaker 2: in some species. And there is a lot of evidence
Speaker 2: that caffeine can be evolved can be involved in anti
Speaker 2: i competition interactions among especially young plants. What So, they
Speaker 2: looked at putting coffee seeds into augur just to see
Speaker 2: what was going on with relative caffeine levels as plants
Speaker 2: germinate and grown. We already established that they will really
Speaker 2: ramp up production while the seedling itself is growing. But
Speaker 2: what they found out is that the seed coat will
Speaker 2: actually leach a considerable amount of caffeine up to twenty
Speaker 2: two percent of the caffeine within the coat itself into
Speaker 2: its surrounding environment. And when they use different levels of caffeine,
Speaker 2: especially that reflect background natural levels of what we're seeing
Speaker 2: from the leeching of the seeds. It's actually been shown
Speaker 2: to inhibit germination and growth of the surrounding vegetation. How Yeah,
Speaker 2: so these seedlings are releasing a ton of caffeine into
Speaker 2: the soil, which will inhibit the germination of potential competitors
Speaker 2: that could overgrow them and steal light, water, and nutrients
Speaker 2: from them. So caffeine is actually also an anti competition compound.
Speaker 2: It's allelopathy using chemical warfare. I do not know the
Speaker 2: mechanisms of it, but I'm assuming it has something to
Speaker 2: do with the metabolism. Here's a plant that's producing it,
Speaker 2: harming other plants that might not be or it could
Speaker 2: even just be within its own self, you know, within
Speaker 2: its tissues, it's fine. But if it's in the soil,
Speaker 2: interacting with the root hairs, maybe even you know, the
Speaker 2: fungi that they're partnering with. There's a lot of mechanisms
Speaker 2: with which allelopathy can work, and it's one of those
Speaker 2: areas of science that we're only really starting to get
Speaker 2: our heads wrapped around. And it's it's it's difficult to study,
Speaker 2: so there's a lot of open ended questions. But that's
Speaker 2: just call for more attention, call for more work. Coffee
Speaker 2: is really easy to germinate, so it's something you could
Speaker 2: do in a greenhouse study pretty much anywhere in the world.
Speaker 2: So hey, kids, So what's amazing is we have this
Speaker 2: dual benefit here. We have an anti herbivery antipathogen really
Speaker 2: protect plants as they grow, and then they're also involved
Speaker 2: in anti competition, so keeping your space free of potential competitors.
Speaker 2: But going back to the question about citrus, there is
Speaker 2: also evidence that caffeine is highly involved for a lot
Speaker 2: of the plant species that produce it in pollination. And
Speaker 2: this is where things get really cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: So this is best studied in coffee and citrus. But
Speaker 2: again with the amount of plant species that are known
Speaker 2: to do it and probably are still yet to be
Speaker 2: kind of described or discovered to be doing it, a
Speaker 2: lot of these plants pump small amounts of caffeine into
Speaker 2: their nectar, small amounts not nearly enough to be at
Speaker 2: that level of sort of anti orbavery or preventative. But
Speaker 2: when they looked at this, they started asking these questions,
Speaker 2: what is this anti orbivery compound doing in nectar? You know,
Speaker 2: this is supposed to be the one place where a
Speaker 2: plant really wants an organism or at least an insect
Speaker 2: to interact with it. So they studied this in and
Speaker 2: again all of this is done in species that have
Speaker 2: been domesticated have use to humans just because of the funding,
Speaker 2: but it really has a lot of implications for what's
Speaker 2: going on out in the wild. Nonetheless, caffeine concentrations in
Speaker 2: nectar were found to not exceed the bees bitter taste threshold,
Speaker 2: and I really want to know how they decided where
Speaker 2: that was.
Speaker 3: They just asked their like, can you taste it now?
Speaker 3: And the bees are like this, yes, and they're like
Speaker 3: can you taste it now? And I'm like this.
Speaker 2: And then they're like boos, booze. But the fact that
Speaker 2: the levels and the leaves and the levels in the
Speaker 2: nectar seem to be highly regulated for uptick and production,
Speaker 2: but keeping below a threshold and the nectar implies that
Speaker 2: there is some sort of a selection for pharmacological activity
Speaker 2: within the nectar that isn't supposed to function as a repellent.
Speaker 2: And what they found is that when researchers presented bees
Speaker 2: with naturalistic levels of caffeine in any sort of drink.
Speaker 2: The bees were able to not only remember, locate, and
Speaker 2: understand the floral sense much higher than in any situation
Speaker 2: in which there was no caffeine in the nectar.
Speaker 3: So it also increased their alertness and their productivity, and
Speaker 3: their and their.
Speaker 1: Focus and their guests desire to poop.
Speaker 2: Yep, they're just squirting little bee poops everywhere as they go.
Speaker 2: But the thought is that actually the plants have also
Speaker 2: co opted a slight amount of caffeine in their nectar
Speaker 2: to enhance the memories of reward within their pollinators, which
Speaker 2: secures pollinator fidelity and improves the reproductive success of the
Speaker 2: plant overall.
Speaker 1: That is incredible. That is beautiful.
Speaker 2: It's mind blowing. So you have defense, you have minimizing competition,
Speaker 2: and you've got your sex taken care of. This is
Speaker 2: hitting all three of the major instances of things that
Speaker 2: actually influence plants in all steps of their life. Some
Speaker 2: of the most basic things in life is surviving, not
Speaker 2: getting sick, and being able to reproduce, and caffeine is
Speaker 2: involved apparently in all of those in the species that
Speaker 2: is producing it, that are producing it.
Speaker 4: Wow, Wow, what a gorgeous story did you come across
Speaker 4: anywhere about like when it was estimated that caffeine first evolved,
Speaker 4: like when plants first started to produce caffeine.
Speaker 2: So I did, but it seems like one of those
Speaker 2: things that's like heavily debated because you do have gymnosperms
Speaker 2: that produce like ephedra is from ephedrin is from ephedra,
Speaker 2: which is a gymnosperm that's probably much older than most
Speaker 2: of the flowering plant lineages, and estimates put most conservative
Speaker 2: the evolution of flowering plants somewhere in their cretaceous so
Speaker 2: when t Rex was rooming the landscape, and so, you know,
Speaker 2: some of these lineages can be dated back to the
Speaker 2: Miocene the Eocene, you know, so forty fifty million years ago,
Speaker 2: but some of these lineages go back much farther. There's
Speaker 2: fossil evidence for them, and the problem is is we
Speaker 2: just don't know. It's you can't look at a fossil
Speaker 2: and tell what kind of chemical constituents were being produced.
Speaker 2: All we can say is this is affiliated with this order.
Speaker 2: This order is known for producing a lot of it.
Speaker 2: Potentially it was.
Speaker 1: There, yeah, yeah, And are they all? Are all of
Speaker 1: these plant species concentrated in the tropics and subtropics, so.
Speaker 2: The major ones that we talked about today. Yes, and
Speaker 2: there is a really interesting latitudinal gradient if for anyone
Speaker 2: that's familiar with this, it's basically going from the poles
Speaker 2: to the equator, there's usually a really strong gradient of
Speaker 2: like spices, all of these antimicrobial, anti herbivy compounds. They
Speaker 2: increase the closer you get to the equator. But so
Speaker 2: does biodiversity. So all of the pressures and the climate
Speaker 2: of like inducing microbial attacks, fungal attacks, those are all
Speaker 2: way worse than the tropics. So the idea that you
Speaker 2: would see a lot more plants potentially stumbling onto this
Speaker 2: evolutionary process in the tropics, it just makes biological sense
Speaker 2: in the long run, like the laws of thermodynamics probably
Speaker 2: play in there just as much as as evolution does.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I love these episodes.
Speaker 3: I was just gonna say that I love these episodes
Speaker 3: so much.
Speaker 2: These are the horizon expanding episodes for me, because it's
Speaker 2: like I am able to connect so many more dots afterwards.
Speaker 1: So cool, that's so cool.
Speaker 3: Wow, plants are really incredible. We don't give them enough credit.
Speaker 2: I'm telling you, that's why I'm here.
Speaker 3: Well, it's why we need to. Oh that was so fun.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much.
Speaker 1: I learned. Gosh, yeah, thank you so great. Yes, thank you.
Speaker 2: I always walk away a more full person after this.
Speaker 1: Thank you very much. Oh this was great. Now we
Speaker 1: just have to it was brainstorm our next one.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Any requests anyone, send them our way?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Please.
Speaker 1: I guess do we do sources? Now?
Speaker 3: You should do sources?
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, so let me pull mine up. I drew
Speaker 1: heavily from a few different books that I'll mention. One
Speaker 1: was called The World of Caffeine, The Science and Culture
Speaker 1: of the World's most Popular Drug by Weinberg and Beeler,
Speaker 1: and then I also read I also listened to a
Speaker 1: book because it's only an audio book, which is the
Speaker 1: first time I've encountered that called Caffeine, How Caffeine Created
Speaker 1: the Modern World by Michael Pollin, and then finally by
Speaker 1: Mayor and Hoe, The True History of Tea. And I
Speaker 1: watched a documentary that is on YouTube called Black Coffee,
Speaker 1: and it's a Canadian National Film Board documentary. It's like
Speaker 1: a three parter. It's really interesting, but I will say
Speaker 1: that the last section is like a bit too much
Speaker 1: like a Starbucks episode for me to feel comfortable with.
Speaker 2: But the first two great cool. So yeah. I pulled
Speaker 2: from a handful of papers that I guess we can
Speaker 2: link in the show notes or whatever you like to do.
Speaker 2: So the first one was Caffeine and related methylsanthenes possible
Speaker 2: natural occurring pesticides by Nathan nineteen eighty four, oh Nathanson,
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty four. The second one was purine alkaloid formation
Speaker 2: in buds and developing leaflets of Coffea Arabica expression of
Speaker 2: an optimal defense strategy by frisknect at All nineteen eighty six.
Speaker 2: Convergent evolution of caffeine implants by co option of exacted
Speaker 2: ancestral enzymes by Hwenga at All twenty sixteen. And the
Speaker 2: immune immunohistochemical localization of caffeine and young Camellia sinensis by
Speaker 2: Breda at All twenty thirteen. And then finally, caffeine in
Speaker 2: floral nectar enhances a pollinator's memory of reward by right
Speaker 2: at All twenty thirteen.
Speaker 3: Awesome, excellent. I had a number of articles. I don't
Speaker 3: want to read all of their titles, so suffice to
Speaker 3: say we will post them all on our website, this
Speaker 3: podcast will kill You dot com, where you can find
Speaker 3: our sources for this episode and every single one of
Speaker 3: our episodes. There's some great ones, especially if you want
Speaker 3: to read more about, for example, the effects on dementia,
Speaker 3: whether or not it's a diuretic, the effects on your
Speaker 3: cardiovascular health, et cetera, et cetera. I got papers for
Speaker 3: all those.
Speaker 1: And we'll also put all of these onto our bookshop
Speaker 1: dot org affiliate page, as well as our Goodreads booklist,
Speaker 1: so if you want to read some books or listen
Speaker 1: to some books, check them out.
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 3: Thank you again, Matt so much for coming on. We
Speaker 3: love having you on this podcast. It's so much fun
Speaker 3: and we learned so much every episode.
Speaker 2: Thank you both so much for having me. It's always
Speaker 2: a black I miss you all so much and I
Speaker 2: can't wait till we can do this in person again.
Speaker 1: Oh my gosh, I know, I know, I was just
Speaker 1: thinking that and I was like, I can't even say,
Speaker 1: it's too sad, but I.
Speaker 2: Know, sorry, I'm the downer.
Speaker 1: Well, hey, you usually I'm the downer, so it works.
Speaker 1: And then when we do meet, we will drink all
Speaker 1: the quarantinies. Well, we'll just carry on and then have
Speaker 1: some caffeine for the next morning.
Speaker 2: As we say, quarantines and coffee.
Speaker 3: Will be It's a bad combo by the way, but
Speaker 3: separate topic.
Speaker 1: You mean for locos, bad for you?
Speaker 4: Yeah?
Speaker 2: What? Oh my god.
Speaker 1: Also, thank you to Bloodmobile for providing the music for
Speaker 1: this episode and all of our episodes.
Speaker 3: And thank you to you listeners. We hope that you
Speaker 3: enjoyed this episode. Thanks so much for sticking around.
Speaker 1: Yes, thank you, thank you, thanks for listening. Wait, Matt,
Speaker 1: you should tell everyone where to get where to listen
Speaker 1: to your stuff, and where to find stuff.
Speaker 2: Yeah. In Defensive Plants is on all the major podcastchers.
Speaker 2: Just google it so you know iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, that
Speaker 2: sort of stuff. In Defensiveplants dot com is the website
Speaker 2: blog a lot of really cool updates. That's where you're
Speaker 2: going to find them. Twitter, Instagram, please follow there. I've
Speaker 2: got a lot of cool stuff coming out in the
Speaker 2: next couple of months and big announcements, so please stay tuned.
Speaker 2: If you enjoy these sorts of things, there's more to
Speaker 2: be found. So yeah, go check it out and say.
Speaker 1: Hi, Yeah I can I can attest that your the
Speaker 1: in Defensive Plants Twitter or Instagram is incredible.
Speaker 2: Thank you so I enjoy it.
Speaker 1: I appreciate that great content. Okay, well, until next time,
Speaker 1: wash your hands.
Speaker 3: You filthy animals. Ou