Part 2

“Denicotinized” Percent Cigarette. Nicotine Sano 2.32 Cestrada Virginia 2.10 Dormy Turkish 1.19 Sackett 1.02

Next I shall list the cigars and the smoking tobacco analyzed--

Normal

Reyes de Espana 1.16 Manila 1.31 Knickerbocker 1.90

“Denicotinized”

Sano 1.07 O-Nic-O .72 Sackett .67

The smoking tobaccos tested ran--

Normal

Blue Boar Pipe 1.45 Weldon Slice 1.84 Hudson Bay Imperial 1.95 Gilbert’s Mixture 2.09

“Denicotinized”

Dormy Smoking 2.26 Sackett .98 O-Nic-O .97

In short, the average for all brands tested stood 1.77 percent nicotine straight and 1.28 percent still in the “denicotinized” products. Seventy-two percent of the nicotine remains behind. The process is, like the process of removing caffeine from coffees, very largely bunk but it is bunk that makes the American people spend their money, as Barnum very well knew. A person can with considerable ease select an ordinary tobacco which is so near the nicotine content of the “denicotinized” varieties that he scarcely seems justified in paying the higher prices for the treated product.

Was ever a nation so neurotic over its health as ours? European observers are constantly amazed at the imbecile delight we show in all sorts of products especially treated to make them less toxic, more digestible, less harmful and more beneficial. Just tell an American that you have vacuum treated your coffee and have thereby removed some obscure organic compounds which normally tie his stomach in knots and he will faithfully believe you and buy it. Tell him you have taken the nicotine out of his cigarette and though 72 percent of it is still there he will buy. Tell him Grapenuts make his teeth sound and he will buy. Tell him that he can improve his health by standing on his head on a cake of ice in a blast furnace while somebody shoots a stream of liquid platinum in his left ear and you will find some fool to do it in America. Why are we such damned fools? I am not going to tell you. I don’t know. But we are.

IS COFFEE DRINKING HARMFUL?

It is recorded in the annals of history that a certain doctor once told a certain patient to drink no coffee. Were you, perchance, the patient? I know I was. But why did the doctor say that? Because if we stopped there would be more coffee left for him?

It is also recorded that there once lived a certain Arab whose name comes down to us as Chadely. Chadely is reputed to have been the initial coffee drinker of the world and he drank an extract of the berry to combat a continual drowsiness which prevented him from attending punctually his religious devotions! In this others of the Mohammedan faithful rapidly followed him, and the habit might well be cultivated by certain church-going Christians with sedative pastors.

Now I am one of those most unfortunate persons over whom alcohol has no appreciable authority. I confess this with shame and deep humiliation. Right in this Prohibition Era when various nondescript alcoholic beverages are held in higher esteem than ever before in our history (for does not the lowliest shellac now become a sacred and inviolate symbol of a personal liberty we would not recognize in this collectivist country if we saw it?) I can drink one, two or even three glasses of high voltage and yet remain placid, neutral, passionless, taciturn and erect in posture. So far as I am concerned even the dynamic and remorseless cocktail of these days is just so much ill-tasting liquid. Isn’t this tragic?

But I would not prohibit the sale, ingurgitation or even the flagrant abuse of these curiously synthesized beverages, or even of good alcohol drinks. Not for one single prohibitive instant. For I want my coffee and some day some bluenose wowser might seek to deprive me of the cup that really cheers me. For I can arise in the morning hopeless, misanthropic, pessimistic, with a strong suicidal impulse, a feeling of uselessness and a Calvinistic conviction of sin--yet one cup of good coffee completely reverses my emotions and stirs me to optimism, confidence, cheer and incipient exaltation. I can be induced to consider new fur coats and parlor rugs.

Or again, in the evening, I may have sunk into a mental stupor, becoming in fact so definitely subhuman that I can only listen to a radio or read a newspaper--but coffee at once changes the entire universe and suffuses me with self-satisfaction, energy, will power and complacency--jostles my brain cells rudely against each other and clicks out of them what little useful information there is in them. Indeed I strongly sympathize with any dull soul who momentarily sweeps aside the stagnant miasmas of toil, monotony and misery with a swig of ethyl alcohol--in varied disguise. Insensitive to alcohol I do exactly the same thing with caffeine.

It is a most curious matter upon which to meditate. The entire universe is not something static and permanently postulated by definition. It is not even what I made it a moment ago. It is what coffee makes me and makes me make it at this moment. Leaving my entire environment, debts and all, and my complete mental and somatic equipment _in statu quo_ one dash of caffeine completely reorganizes the universe for me and as completely modifies my reaction thereto. The final test in any scientific experiment takes place when one variable factor accomplishes such results while all other factors remain completely unaltered. I know my coffee.

But of course this is a world wherein doctors sound solemn tocsins to pleasure. You go to them and they almost invariably admonish you to quit smoking tobacco and drinking coffee, to have your teeth pulled and your tonsils uprooted. Some years ago I myself suffered from chronic indigestion. I was on a meticulous diet which lacked meat and coffee and I was about ready to accuse coffee alone of all my indispositions. But I met a hardy old codger of eighty who drank eight cups of strong coffee daily and had but recently reduced his consumption from a normal dozen and his vigor, which he attributed to seventy years of strong coffee, greatly heartened me. I knew what the doctor would say. I didn’t smoke. Teeth and coffee alone were left. So I went soberly to the expert in exodontia.

He at first demurred and insisted that I had no teeth meriting destruction. But I was desperate. I insisted. So he X-rayed around, finally selected an inoffensive and courteous molar and drew it. The shock or something proved beneficial. At least I had no more indigestion and even learned how to drink two cups of strong coffee and go to sleep on the draft. This is the final step in expert coffee drinking. When you can perform that feat and outwit your imagination you have come into the inner circle of The Sacred Coffee Drinkers’ Conclave.

But I remained curious. I wondered why doctors said drink no coffee. I determined to find out something about this. Botany didn’t get me very far. It simply declared “Coffee is the product of a rubiaceous plant indigenous to Abyssinia of the _genus_ coffea; there are about twenty-five known species, of which coffea Arabica is the most important commercially.”

History was slightly more productive. It appeared coffee drinking was of respectable age and that the substance derived its name from K’hawah, or Kaffa, an Abyssinian Province, and that there it was employed as a stimulant for centuries before its introduction into Arabia. The Arab physician Khayes, who lived 850-922 A. D., wrote on coffee and knowledge of the plant arrived in Europe by the late sixteenth century. It is most interesting to remember that these Arabian Mohammedans used coffee as an anti-soporific during prolonged religious ceremonies. Yet the beverage at first underwent violent protest because strictly orthodox and conservative priests held it to be intoxicating and hence under the ban of the Koran.

At Constantinople certain dervishes also held that after roasting coffee had become a kind of coal which the Prophet had denounced as inedible. Thereupon the coffee houses were closed. But a lenient mufti later proved to the satisfaction of the faithful that roasted coffee was not coal and they were reopened.

The earliest European coffee houses were established, in fact, in Constantinople and in Venice. The first one appeared in England in 1650; out of it grew the Oxford Coffee Club in 1655 and from that sprang the Royal Society itself. But alas, convivial gatherings at coffee houses became of ill repute; wives complained they could not expect their husbands back from errands because they would loiter in coffee houses and kings declared that their subjects met at coffee houses, became garrulous and bespoke political rebellion. The current Volstead, Charles II, therefore, sought to suppress coffee drinking, but evidently Anglo-Saxons valued their liberties more then than now for the King had little success. Frederick the Great, fearing coffee drinking for the more thrifty reason that it caused too much money to leave his domain, boldly attributed sterility to indulgence in the berry and sought to restrict the use of coffee by a license system.

The medical profession came forward to denounce coffee for all sorts of sins. The English Dr. Pecoke accused it of causing leprosy. Dr. Duncan of Montpellier in 1706 wrote in opposition to all hot beverages while James the I actually composed a royal “Broadside Against Coffee.” The kingly book contained this gem--

Confusion huddles all into one scene, Like Noah’s arks, the clean and the unclean, For now, alas! the drink has credit got, And he’s no gentleman who drinks it not.

Millingen in his “Curiosities of Medical Experiences,” 1837, said that coffee in excess produced “feverish heat and a predisposition to apoplexy.” But he did commend coffee and tea as beverages affording stimulus without producing intoxication. Francis Bacon declared that “coffee comforteth the heart and helpeth digestion” while Bach, to offset this, wrote his Cantata No. 211 of the “Secular Cantatas” to protest its use.

In 1792 Dr. Benjamin Moseley said doubt existed as to whether coffee was a tonic or a sedative, but believed that it had intrinsic food value. Every now and then individuals arise to denounce or to praise an article of diet or a diet system and to declare that all men should hear and follow because this idea was of benefit to them. Such statements can have no standing in science, even when made by a doctor and based upon his actual experiences with a few patients. The only possible way to find out whether coffee, say, is beneficial, or the reverse is to investigate the literature and try to poll the authorities each one of whom has examined large numbers of individual cases to see if any general statements can be hazarded. Even then we cannot make final conclusions but we can assay general trends.

Is coffee harmful then? What do physiologists, pharmacologists and medical men say? Coffee demonstrably enlivens the intellect, removes the sensation of fatigue and makes the subject feel more comfortable. These are gifts not to be sniffed out of court. But is coffee safe and harmless enough that we may dare indulge ourselves in this pleasant reaction in a world where the pleasant is so readily assumed to be _per se_ the invidious--and so often is actually so? The question is in dispute like most questions considered settled by many people. There is no more reason to conclude one way than the other in so far as average adults are concerned. All who say dogmatically “No coffee--it is very harmful” are as wrong as all who state the opposite of this.

In his “Personal and Community Health” C. E. Turner says coffee is not harmful to most adults in reasonable quantities. G. N. Stewart’s “Physiology” remarks that tea and coffee are safe stimulants because they have no bad after effects. Stewart also cautions against their abuse, but it may as well be stated at once that the question of abuse introduces an altogether new factor. Water and salt are absolutely necessary to life but the abuse of either is injurious. We can produce true water intoxications and salt eaten to excess can do us much harm. All articles of diet from parsnips and lamb chops to caffeine and alcohol can harm if abused and we should assume when speaking of them a sane, rational use and regard abuse as a harmful condition of a different order altogether.

As C. E. A. Winslow well says in his “Healthy Living”--“The fact that tea and coffee sometimes become tyrants does not mean that such drinks are necessarily bad.”

In one thing medical authorities do agree, however, coffee and tea are not beverages for children. Moralists to the contrary notwithstanding, this is again beside the point when we are considering the reasonable use of coffee by adults. Adults and children are essentially different animals using their food intake differently--the one for upkeep and repair the other for new construction as well as upkeep and repair. They differ basically in metabolism. They have different metabolic rates and different expenditures of energy. The child is turning food into flesh and bone and blood at a much greater rate than a fully-grown adult organism is ever required to do. Diets which would amply sustain an adult may easily be detrimental to or deficient for young and growing children. We shall, then, restrict ourselves herein to the rational use of coffee by average adults. What can coffee, or its active principle caffeine, do to harm adults?

Caffeine definitely increases the force of the heart beat. Yet Wood, “Notice of Judgment Under the Food and Drugs Act No. 1455 1912,” says such an effect may be desirable since a slower rate and increased force induce cardiac efficiency. Heavy coffee drinking may produce a frequent, hard pulse and palpitations, but this again goes over into the territory of abuse.

Coffee tends both to dilate the vascular system and to constrict it, the net result being a mass movement of the blood without increased blood pressure. Coffee has repeatedly been suspected of damage to the heart and blood vessels but such suspicions are common in therapy and evidence is entirely lacking to prove this point scientifically. Suspicion is here probably no more legitimate than in many lay superstitions. While patients with definite heart trouble should avoid all stimulants the normal use of coffee by an adult cannot be said to have an insidious effect upon the heart and blood vessels.

While coffee is a diuretic it cannot be convicted of renal injury as yet. Indeed it is quite probable that the kidneys become accustomed to caffeine while A. R. Cushny (J. Pharmacol. & Experimental Therapy 4 363) declares that caffeine does not injure the kidneys even when given in large dosage over long periods.

But how about digestion? Years ago Fraser (J. of Anatomy & Physiology 184 13 1883) said that coffee and tea hindered the digestion of protein foodstuffs with the exception of ham and eggs! This very fortunate immunity renders the typical American dish a safe breakfast in any case. In general, however, observations _in vivo_ indicate that the amounts of the beverage usually taken have no evil effects upon digestion. Indeed some investigators have found a pronounced increase in gastric secretion following tea and coffee.

Hutchinson in his “Food and Dietetics” says that the digestive disturbance caused by such infused beverages is negligible in health. Others have held that the aromatic constituents of coffee, or the “empyreumatic oil,” upset digestion. There may be some reason for this; at least certain individuals tolerate much better coffee from which these substances have been removed.

Caffeine is of course a stimulant to the central nervous system, particularly that part of it intimately associated with the gastric function. How far is its use as such a cerebral stimulant advisable? Like all stimulants this will result in greater fatigue on excessive usage. But as “The Medical Review of Reviews” once said, “When tea and coffee are made moderate in strength and partaken of in sober quantities they are gentle stimulants and their effect upon the nervous system is salutary.” A too constant reliance on coffee as a goad may of course result in nervous irritability.

Coffee speeds up the metabolism, increases the body heat and heat elimination, and perhaps urges us on to greater activity. But, as the English pharmacologist Dixon remarks in his “Manual of Pharmacology,” “Caffeine decidedly facilitates the performance of all forms of physical work.” Yet certain athletes are reported to have had their performances injured by coffee drinking, while Osborn holds that coffee interferes with the best muscular efforts. Take Hobson’s choice here, you have an authority either way and we do love some one to give our opinions an affidavit. It may be observed that coffee also increases the rate and depth of our respiration.

The following gracefully and euphoniously named aromatics have been found in roasted coffee--pyrol, quinol, methylamin, acetone, furfuryl alcohol, a derivative of saligenin, phenols, valeric acid, pyridin and trimethylamin. You are no doubt much surprised and edified to know that. Some of these compounds are toxic, but they occur in coffee in amounts far too small to be dangerous to health. Some have accused these formidably named derivatives of bad effects but the work existing shows caffeine to be the only coffee constituent of importance in its physiological effects. It is agreed that caffeine is very rapidly changed by the body into less active substances and disposed of, so there can be no cumulative effect even of that. In old age, as in youth, coffee, like other stimulants, should be used in moderation if at all.

As a whole then what can we conclude about the use of coffee by adults? Science has not found it harmful when taken in non-excessive amounts. Heart patients, neurotics, the young and the aged should avoid it. It has not been proven to cause pathological changes in the heart, blood vessels or kidneys. It is a valuable cerebral stimulant and antidote for mental fatigue, lacking as it does the bad effects of most stimulants. It also stimulates respiration and speeds up the metabolism, while its effects on digestion cannot be said to be definitely deleterious. Tea, because of its tannin content, is probably worse than coffee gastrically. Finally caffeine is rapidly oxidized and has no cumulative poisonous effect.

Most important of all we must remember that individuals differ. They are constructed of different proteins and have cellular and glandular processes differing from individual to individual. What one can do with impunity another will find bringing him nearer to the undertaker daily. In this as in all other matters dietetic common sense and sound judgment in appraising our own state of health and the reactions of our organism to various stimuli will always surpass slavish subservience to systems or morbid efforts to avoid all harm and achieve an impossible all good.

Then if we are to drink coffee let us consider momentarily how best to make it. One basic fact stands out--freshly ground coffee is best. Ground coffee loses its flavor on standing. It also loses its content of carbon dioxide. These two factors are definitely related but exactly how and why we do not know.

In considering coffee-making precise scientific methods are everything. Our mothers, more energetic than the decadent women of today, made their own bread. They often appraised various flours by such rude methods and declared this brand better than that. How much could they have known about it? Did they keep every factor constant except the flour when making their tests? You know they did not.

Go into the laboratory in the U. S. Bureau of Chemistry, where flour bought by the government is tested, and what do you see? You see an apparatus enabling the investigator to make bread from that flour holding every factor constant except the flour. All other materials used are precisely the same and all materials are carefully weighed. The dough is kneaded mechanically and timed exactly. Fermentation takes place in a cabinet at a constant temperature and for a definite time for all loaves. The same holds for the time and temperature of baking. The loaves are cooled just alike on wire meshes for the same time. They are weighed and their volumes measured. Then the investigator positively knows which flour makes the best loaf of bread and the government buys that flour for its hospitals and penitentiaries.

It is exactly the same with coffee. To test coffees they must be infused in very precise ways. How is it done? In the first place pulverized coffee must pass a 30 mesh sieve and be like fine cornmeal, medium ground coffee must pass a 10 mesh sieve and be like steel cut; coarsely ground coffee must pass an 8 mesh sieve and appear like the rude, home ground bean of our childhood.

Then boiling, boiling with egg, percolation and filtration must be tried on each by precise methods. A 40c. Mocha-Java coffee may be used with 12 grams of coffee and 240 cc. of water, except in the case of percolation which requires 480 cubic centimeters of water for 12 grams of coffee. In boiling with egg 10 grams of egg white were added. The infusion must be governed precisely.

Boiling takes place in a seamless white enamel pot, cold water being poured over the coffee, the whole brought to a boil and boiling continued for three minutes; the infusion then stood five minutes and was ready. It was strained through cheese cloth. Percolation was carried out in the usual manner with an ordinary percolator, the water being cold at the start and boiling being continued for five minutes. In filtration a wire strainer was put across the top of the pot covered with a piece of tennis flannel upon which the coffee lay. Boiling water was poured through once.

The brews were tested hot, for strength, color, and flavor by various people who did not know the methods of preparation. Six degrees of strength were observed with specific gravities of the brew by test as shown in the table--

Very weak 1.0045 Specific Gravity Weak 1.0055 Specific Gravity Moderately strong 1.0060 Specific Gravity Standard 1.0065 Specific Gravity A little too strong 1.0070 Specific Gravity Much too strong 1.0080 Specific Gravity

The specific gravity was taken on the cold brew and a standard, 1.0065 was selected for further tests. The following table indicating condition of coffee, method of brew, weight of coffee used and cost per cup is of considerable interest--

S. G. 1.0065 Cost Condition Method Weight Coffee per cup of infusion Grams cents

Pulverized Boiling 12.05 .63 Pulverized Percolated 12.78 .71 Pulverized Boiled with egg 12.85 1.05 Pulverized Filtered 12.31 .72 Medium Boiling 15.89 .83 Medium Percolated 22.94 1.29 Medium Boiled with egg 16.71 1.29 Medium Filtered 30.00 1.73 Coarse Boiling 19.79 1.03 Coarse Percolated 27.52 1.54 Coarse Boiled with egg 21.27 1.56

Hence it is apparent that pulverizing is the most efficient method of grinding. The best brew is made by filtration. Boiling with egg is second best while plain boiling and percolation are the poorest of all. In general, strength and color of the brew are quite independent of the blend and price but depend upon the grind. The flavor, however, varies markedly with the coffee brand and price. Java, Sumatra and Bogota give weaker infusions under the same conditions than do Mocha and Santos. The order of preference for flavor stood--Java, Sumatra, Santos, Bogota and Mocha. It was also observed that coffee which had stood long after grinding gave an infusion of a lower specific gravity and hence of impaired strength.