We've all laughed at those T-shirts or mugs with slogans like "Instant Human - Just add coffee!". But it seems there's more than a vein of truth to them.
Billions of people around the world are addicted to their daily cup (or more) of coffee. Apart from the taste, many people justify it as their necessary kick-start for the day to help them function at work and to give them an edge in alertness and mental capacity.
However, a recent study by Prof Peter Rogers from the University of Bristol's school of Experimental Psyhcology has found that rather than giving you an edge on your peppermint tea swilling peers, that daily dose of caffeine may in fact be needed to counter-act the symptoms of withdrawal from your last cuppa!
So rather than being a dose of "Mondayitis" or a general aversion to your workplace or colleagues, that mental fog, dull headache and general sense of fatigue is in fact likely to be caused by you coming down off your last caffeine high.
Whilst coffee will keep you awake, it won't make you any smarter than your colleagues who are on the decaf.
But what about the other health benefits? Coffee and tea have well documented health benefits. For example, a May 2012 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that coffee drinkers
who drank at least two or three cups a day were about 10 percent or 15 percent less likely to die for any reason during the 13 years of the study.
So if coffee won't help you much in the office, but will potentially make you less likely to cark it, the next question is: what about on the sporting field? Here the news is even better. According to the American College of Sports Medicine's fact sheet:
Caffeine ingestion (3-9 mg/kg bw) prior to exercise increases performance during prolongedendurance exercise and short-term intense exercise lasting approx. 5 minutes in the laboratory. These results are generally reported in well-trained elite or recreational athletes, but field studies are required to test caffeine’s ergogenic potency in the athletic world.
Perhaps the best approach lies in that old adage of "moderation in all things".
If you like your coffee (and the many other foods and beverages containing caffiene) and you can accept that if you have it regularly you're probably addicted to it, then it probably won't do you much harm. Putting lots of sugar in it? Well that's another question!
