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