Confessions of a Caffeine Addict
My name is Owen and I’m a caffeine addict.
Despite having an impressive collection of loyalty cards that I use for a network of cafes and caffeine shooting galleries around home and work, the thing that most motivates me to reduce the amount of coffee I drink is the cost. Coffee addiction is pretty darn expensive when you only buy large and mostly order soy (though I note that the incidence of soy-persecution is being less practiced these days).
In an effort reduce the cost of of buying multiple large soy lattes each day, I launched “Operation Tea Cosy”, because everything sounds more impressive if you give it a name that starts off with “Operation”.
Anyone unlucky enough to be within my verbal range might remember it was originally called “Operation Tea Bag” but too many of you had dirty minds and associated that with the legally defined sexual act of the same name, which is why I changed the name to something that invokes an activity with no sexy results.
Operation Tea Cosy largely consisted of getting my caffeine fix first at home using my Nespresso pod machine, then substituting the coffees I’d normally drink throughout the day with green tea instead. I even got an IngenuiTea Tea Pot so I could look cool and thereby combine a need for social acceptance with tea drinking.
The end result is I’m still drinking large soy lattes, only now I’m also drinking a lot of green tea. Actually I think I might actually be drinking slightly more coffee now than I did before Operation Tea Cosy. I also think I might now be addicted to green tea.
This leads me to the completely un-scientifically tested theory that green tea is in fact a gateway drug to increased caffeine addiction. On the other hand, as far as addictions go, either coffee or green tea are the best.
Green Tea Joy
It seems to be associated with better cardiovascular health since it lowers total cholesterol, but raises HDL (“good”) cholesterol. Green tea *might* be associated reduction in the incidence of cancer – though the research is a little inconclusive at this point so you can put this in the category of maybe or maybe not.
Coffee Joy
Caffeine appears to minimise the onset and/or impact of cognitive decline associated with aging. So drink coffee and there is less chance of forgetting where you put your car keys and the names of your friends and family. Too much caffeine will definitely kill you, and it’s generally considered that regularly drinking 4-7 cups of coffee per day is a little too much. Given how it is much easier to overdose on alcohol, heroin and Justin Beiber, we can put caffeine in the rather easy-to-manage basket of addictive drugs along with water and air, which can also kill you in extremely large quantities, but generally ok to have copious amounts of.
So in the grand scheme of things, I figure although Operation Tea Cosy has failed in it’s original objective to reduce my consumption of coffee, the extra green tea in my diet that has arisen as a consequence is probably not such a bad thing.
