Caffeine and healthy caffeine is a kind of plant alkaloid.

Caffeine is a kind of plant alkaloid. At present, more than 60 kinds of plants are known to contain caffeine, of which coffee and tea are the most common. In fact, this is a product of tropical plants adapting to the environment-there is no winter in the tropics, and diseases and insect pests are more serious, so plants have evolved many ways to defend themselves, and caffeine is one of them, which can be regarded as a natural insecticide. Although some bugs and bacteria adapt to caffeine, caffeine affects the nervous system of animals to prevent them from eating plants. Coffee, tea, cola and even some bottled water contain caffeine in our daily drinks. This is a kind of "addictive" thing, for example, people who are adaptable to caffeine need to use more anesthetic when they extract their teeth. As a result, someone once said, "Coffee is my best anesthetic."

Just as caffeine was loved when it first appeared but was seen as a scourge by dictators, caffeine is often questioned by doctors-although many of them are addicted to coffee. Almost all diseases of human organs have been blamed for coffee, heart, brain, stomach, urinary system, osteoporosis. But so far, the study has not confirmed the above charges of caffeine. What modern medicine can prove is that coffee has a refreshing and fatigue-relieving effect because caffeine inhibits the normal functioning of adenosine in the brain. Because adenosine reduces brain activity and urges the body to rest, when its activity is inhibited, human natural drowsiness and sleep are inhibited.

When coffee was first introduced into Europe, it was used as a medicine to treat diseases. Caffeine, for example, has a diuretic effect, and although some people worry that bones will be excreted with the urine, new research shows that only elderly women with very low calcium intake need to pay attention to this problem. In addition, it has not been confirmed that coffee drinking in pregnant women affects the health of the fetus, or that drinking coffee reduces a woman's chances of becoming pregnant.

Fight against caffeine

The lethal dose of caffeine is 10 grams, which means that caffeine intake will kill you only if you drink 100 cups of coffee continuously. These 100 cups refer to Arabica beans, which contain more than twice as much caffeine as Arabica 10:10 2014-3-30. In addition, smokers are more adaptable to caffeine than non-smokers.

There is no doubt that coffee is a necessity of life, so people began to look for caffeine-free natural coffee trees a long time ago. Four kinds of coffee trees are considered caffeine-free, mainly in the Madagascar archipelago of eastern Africa, but the beans are roasted and tasted bitter and unbearable. So people began to try ways to remove caffeine from coffee. After cooking the remaining coffee beans, Rosros, a German businessman, successfully extracted caffeine with a benzene solvent and patented it. In 1906, he set up a company to specialize in decaf coffee (this method can remove about 98% of the caffeine in coffee). After that, the Swiss invented the method of water extraction, which succeeded in replacing chemical solvents with water. After that, Americans invented dioxane extraction and carbon dioxide extraction-carbon dioxide becomes liquid at 200-300 atmospheric pressure, making it an excellent solvent for extracting caffeine. Carbon dioxide extraction is now widely used mainly because it is neither a chemical solvent such as benzene or dioxane nor does it dissolve substances other than caffeine. Today, decaf or decaffeinated coffee is widely spread around the world, with 1/4 of coffee in the United States being decaf. But as the famous American agronomist Burbank, who is looking for caffeine-free coffee trees, said: if coffee is removed from the pleasant and exciting caffeine, will anyone drink it?

The answer is yes. But at the same time, people are fully convinced that decaf cannot replace coffee at all. Most importantly, although people have some scruples about caffeine addiction, without the addictive caffeine, what else can motivate us to drink a few cups of coffee instead of other drinks every day?