A month ago I had a realization that it’s not the caffeine in coffee that provides stimulation, but rather all the sugar and fat mixed into it. In confusing correlation with causation, people think it’s the caffeine that engenders the productivity-boosting alertness, but it’s actually all the sugar and fat. In other words, it’s the calories, stupid. I bounced the idea online a few times and got pushback; people didn’t want to believe or accept the possibility that coffee is just another vector for sugar and fat, like junk food, not a stimulant in its own right.
As the video above shows, Dunkin’s Pumpkin Swirl Frozen Coffee has as much sugar as a box of glazed donuts, and we’re not even talking about the fat. Where do you think the buzz comes from? I doubt it’s the caffeine anymore. I am sure if someone did a double blind trial of Pumpkin Swirl sans caffeine vs caffeinated Pumpkin Swirl, participants would report no difference.
Every morning ‘Bob’ eats a donut with black coffee and claims to feel alert. I am sure his claimed alertness is coming from the 300-calorie donut, not the coffee. ‘Alice’ orders a Mocha, also containing 300 calories of milk and sugar, to feel alert in the morning. Again, it’s the sugar and milk that is doing the work here.
Pouring spoonsful of milk and sugar into drip coffee effectively turns it into a diluted milkshake. That is where the stimulation comes from, not the caffeine. I too found myself drinking much more coffee when I put Nestle Coffee Mate mix into it, versus only Nescafe. When I was hungry, adding the mix helped, but the black coffee felt inert and useless. I didn’t feel anything. Maybe I had become habituated to it, but why didn’t this happen when I added the mix? It would seem as if sugar and fat have unique properties in which people do not become habituated to it.
The obvious rebuttal is that black coffee tastes bad, hence the need for milk and sugar. But people are more than willing to compromise on taste, or worse, health, if something actually works at providing a ‘pick me up’. Smoking entails inhaling on carcinogenic sticks. A line of cocaine presumably is like inhaling chalk dust. Adderall has a huge list of potential negative side effects. Hard liquor is mixed with carbonated water, not sugar and milk. There is no need to add calories when carbonated water dulls the burn of the alcohol.
People willingly subject themselves to such unpleasantries because those things actually work at providing the sought lift. If caffeine worked even a fraction as well, everyone would just drink it black, with the added obvious bonus of not having to worry about getting fat. But black/drip coffee and expresso are among the least popular items of any coffee shop. A coffee shop makes very little money from selling actual coffee. If all the mixings and confectioners were discontinued, they would all go out of business.
According to Drive Research, 83% of people drink coffee for the taste, which we can infer to mean they are not drinking black or unadulterated coffee, but rather seek the dopamine from the sugar and other stuff added to it.
I think all of this impugns the notion that caffeine provides stimulation, or at least that its reputation as a stimulant may be overstated or due to confusing correlation with causation. We can clearly see from consumer preferences that it’s the added sugar and fat that does. Starbucks became such a huge business (with a market cap of $107 billion as of posting this) by pivoting from ordinary coffees to sugar-laden concoctions. They surmised correctly that people would want to believe they are drinking coffee instead of just downing milkshakes.