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

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• 00:00

  This is the Guardian.

• 00:10

  The Guardian Archive.

• 00:11

  Long read.

• 00:21

  Hi, this is Michael Pollan and I'm the author of the Invisible Addiction Is It Time to Give Up Caffeine?

• 00:27

  Published in 2021.

• 00:30

  The reason I wanted to write this story is caffeine is one of the most important drug relationships we have.

• 00:37

  And I hadn't thought about it as a drug before, but I've always been interested in the uses to which we put plants.

• 00:45

  And we use them for various things such as food, beauty and to change consciousness.

• 00:51

  And this is totally normal.

• 00:53

  But the best case and the most interesting case is our use of specifically coffee and tea, since 90% of humanity has a daily relationship with one of those two plants.

• 01:06

  And I felt like I had to dig in and look at that, and what is that about?

• 01:10

  And did I have a problem?

• 01:12

  Because I drink a lot of coffee and tea.

• 01:15

  I decided I didn't have a problem.

• 01:18

  There is no good reason to give up caffeine unless you have a problem with it.

• 01:23

  That problem would be you can't sleep, you're jittery, you're tense.

• 01:28

  And, yeah, that's a good reason to give it up, or certainly to cut back.

• 01:32

  But I took a deep dive and looked at all the studies we've done around health and caffeine, and believe it or not, the story's pretty positive.

• 01:40

  Caffeine, or I should say coffee and tea because they're not identical.

• 01:45

  There may be things in coffee and tea that are very beneficial from a health point of view that have nothing to do with the caffeine.

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