“This coffee falls in your stomach […]; he manhandles these pretty walls like a carter roughing up young horses. From then on, everything is agitated: ideas are shaken like the battalions of the Grande Armée on the ground of a battle, and the battle takes place.
from Treatise on modern stimulants by Honoré de Balzac, these words express well the effects of coffee on our organisms, as well as on our vision of the world. Discover Magazine cites them in the preamble of an article that lists some surprising information about what it does to us, where it comes from and what the way we consume it means.
1. Coffee makes you spendthrift
In Florida, a research team tried the following experiment: distributing different types of drinks (water, coffee or decaf) to customers in a shopping center. It turns out that the expenditure made by people who consumed caffeine was 50% higher than the others, for a number of items purchased 30% higher than the average.
Coffee would therefore encourage impulse purchases. This seems consistent, since according to other research, caffeine would encourage people to make riskier bets and investments.
2. Coffee helps you work better
in Group
Workgroups apparently work best when coffee is available. This is the conclusion of a study conducted in Ohio: collaborative work would be more satisfying with caffeine than without. Workers would have more elaborate discussions, stay more focused on the subject of their common mission and be more willing.
Consuming coffee would also make it possible to offer more solutions to a given problem, according to another study. However, nothing indicates the degree of relevance of the answers provided.
3. Coffee toughens
More specifically, it tends to increase our resistance to pain. It was at the University of Alabama that researchers in psychology established this observation. Mechanical pressure, heat… Having absorbed caffeine would make you less vulnerable to certain types of external aggressions.
According to Discover Magazine, it is for this reason that caffeine is one of the products frequently administered to top athletes. A Spanish study also suggests that people wishing to burn more fat during exercise drink coffee thirty minutes before the start of their sports session. Beware, however, of caffeine addiction, the effects of which are obviously counterproductive.
4. Coffee has unconscious effects
Coffee would give us more vigor… even before the first sip. A Toronto research group has in fact established that the mere fact of seeing a cup of coffee, or even the sign of one’s favorite supplier, would make one more alert and increase the level of attention. What has been observed in Western society, on the other hand, seems much less true in areas where coffee is not promoted as much. It is therefore the status of the drink that takes precedence.
In New Jersey, behaviorists have also found that the smell of coffee could play a role similar to that of his sight. By proposing algebra problems to individuals in two different rooms, the analysts realized that people in a room with the scent of coffee performed better than those in a room without an odor.
5. Café latte, a liberal thing
Definitely more than a drink, coffee also says who we are. A study conducted in Pennsylvania, for example, shows that Americans considered to be liberal are twice as likely to enjoy a café latte as their conservative compatriots.
The survey conducted indicates that this significant difference is linked to the fact that some are more open to globalization, while others wince much more quickly when they are offered drinks or recipes that they consider foreign.
6. Coffee is in our genes, aversion to it too
Discover Magazine cites two reasons why some people don’t like coffee at all, even when it’s decaffeinated. The first is directly linked to its taste: 25% of the population is said to have an increased sensitivity to certain chemical elements, this having genetic origins.
The second concerns the liver: some individuals assimilate caffeine more slowly, which results in an increased risk of heart attack and hypertension in the event of excessive consumption. It is therefore advisable not to judge those who do not drink coffee, for example by avoiding looking at them as extraterrestrials.
