Coffee

This is why many people reach work on time, because they wake up and stay awake.

Coffee is very interesting.

Coffee is very famous. It is a way to get work done when you’re tired and sleepy. It is a something to offer your friends in a Café (I hope the ‘é’ is correct. It is quite obvious that I am not a student of French.). It is, also, according to many TV series, an excuse to ask for a first date!

When I first consumed coffee, it was when I and my family and the family of a friend (including him) were returning (as far as I remember) from Bhimashankar. I do not remember what the coffee tasted like – it was probably relatively strong and packed with sugar (no wonder the sugar industry is one of the most important industries in India – generally tea and coffee are packed with sugar. Once, I asked for coffee at a hotel in Madhya Pradesh (central state of India) on a tour, and I got a very light brown coloured mixture of sugar and milk.).

The return journey was through a hilly area, and your deduction should have been formed by now.

I vomited in the car, jamming window control for the back seat windows.

After that, I think, I drank coffee when I was 13 years old (after many years). Then, I liked it. It is notable that this new introduction of coffee was, though milk coffee, with no sugar, and hence considerably bitter for the sugar-lover. It came as no big surprise to me, as I can chew medicine tablets without barfing (Do not do this – the medicine is carefully packed so that it is released when it reaches the designated location.).

Slowly, the concentration of the coffee went on increasing. The advised amount is 1 tsp of coffee powder for 1 cup of milk.

But for all users of caffeinated coffee, it is unfortunate that coffee develops tolerance very fast. You get the jolt the first time, the second time, maybe even the third and the fourth, but then, your body ‘needs’ that amount of coffee to be ‘normal’. Then, you need to increase the concentration for the observable effect.

Till the SSC Board Examinations, it reached about 3 heaped tsp in a glass of milk. (Yes, I still drink a glass of milk – just with the addition of coffee). At this stage, one could say that I was addicted to coffee.

Well, they would have been not be wrong. Then, I had decided to lower the concentration to ½ tsp per glass. I did achieve it, and then something happened and to shot back up to 2 tsp per glass.

Note that I have 2 glasses of coffee each day. It was 2 tsp per glass to some days before this.

The very unfortunate time of the exams (1400 to 1700) of the previous few days caused me add an extra cup at 1325, first with 3 tsp, then with 3.5 tsp.

It does sound like a lot of coffee – and it is.

I finally discovered how much coffee (i.e. instant coffee powder) is too much for me. It is 8 tsp in a day.

How did I know? Well, I woke up at 8 am, and slept at 9:30 pm.

That is a really small day. You may achieve a lot in the small day, but feeling so sleepy as to end the day at 9:30 pm, shows that you must be damn exhausted, and that is not good for the long term.

I can only say that it is good the exam are now over.

The tolerance of coffee can be explained very effectively by how it functions:

You should have heard in your education in school about ATP (the energy currency of life). It stands for adenosine triphosphate.

The phosphate bonds are high in energy. The breaking of these bonds releases energy that cells use for various things to live. So, ATP is converted to ADP (‘d’ for ‘di’). When you have a lot of energy, you have a lot of ATP.

When you are tired, fatigued, the energy sources are largely used up. This means that adenosine (the ‘A’ in ‘ATP’) increases in concentration. Our body has receptors for adenosine. They tell the brain that the body is in need of rest.

When you drink caffeinated coffee, the caffeine blocks these receptors. So, your body doesn’t understand it is tired, and this can cause exhaustion.

This also means that the ‘jolt of energy’ is more of a ‘jolt of not being tired’

Well, that’s all for this mid-week article on coffee.

Be sure to read next week’s article.