From the archive: The invisible addiction: is it time to give up caffeine?

The Audio Long Read

The Guardian

Society & Culture

4.3 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 1 January 2025

⏱️ 33 minutes

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Summary

We are raiding the Guardian Long Read archives to bring you some classic pieces from years past, with new introductions from the authors. This week, from 2021: Caffeine makes us more energetic, efficient and faster. But we have become so dependent that we need it just to get to our baseline. By Michael Pollan. Help support our independent journalism at theguardian.com/longreadpod

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The Guardian.
0:09.8	The Guardian Archive Longread.
0:25.0	Hi, this is Michael Pollan, and I'm the author of The Invisible Addiction.
0:28.8	Is it Time to Give Up Caffeine, published in 2021?
0:35.7	The reason I wanted to write this story is caffeine is one of the most important drug relationships we have. And I hadn't thought about it as a drug before.
0:40.1	But I've always been interested in the uses to which we put plants.
0:45.9	And we use them for various things such as food, beauty, and to change consciousness.
0:51.6	And this is totally normal.
0:53.9	But the best case, in the most interesting case,
0:56.9	is our use of specifically coffee and tea.
1:00.4	Since 90% of humanity has a daily relationship
1:04.4	with one of those two plants,
1:06.7	and I felt like I had to dig in and look at that.
1:09.1	And what is that about?
1:10.3	And did I have a problem?
1:12.1	Because I drink a lot of coffee and tea.
1:15.2	I decided I didn't have a problem.
1:18.2	There is no good reason to give up caffeine unless you have a problem with it.
1:23.2	That problem would be you can't sleep, you're jittery, you're tense.
1:28.1	And yeah, that's a good reason to give it up or certainly to cut back.
1:32.1	But I took a deep dive and looked at all the studies we've done around health and caffeine.
1:38.1	And believe it or not, the story is pretty positive.
	...

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