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Regular or Decaf?
By Neil Peterson | April 10, 2009
Last month was National Caffeine Awareness Month, when the Caffeine Awareness Association encourages Americans to give up coffee.
I’m proud to say, I’m ahead of the game. Why? Because I already gave up coffee altogether 25 years ago.
It started 27 years ago. I was on my way to have lunch with George Benson, the Seattle city council member who was known as the “father” of the George Benson Waterfront Streetcar Line in Seattle. George, who passed away in 2004, had a dream to reintroduce streetcars to Seattle. In my role as the head of the Metro, I enthusiastically embraced his dream. Working together, we made it happen.
We met at Andy’s Diner in the SODO section of Seattle, a unique diner that stretches across a series of conjoined rail cars (fitting, considering the purpose of our meeting).
As I walked into the restaurant, I lost my balance and fell over sideways, flat onto the floor. Vertigo. According to the Vestibular Disorders Association, more than 90 million Americans age 17 and older have experienced a dizziness or balance problem, but this was a first for me. I’d never had anything like this before, and there was no advance warning of the fall. I just lost my sense of balance and-splat.
George came to my aid as I lay on the floor, and he was kind enough to drive me to the emergency room where the medical personnel put me through a seemingly endless series of tests. Over the next few weeks I was subjected to even more tests in an effort to figure out what was causing my vertigo.
No luck.
Frustrated, impatient, and exasperated with the whole affair, I finally began conducting my own self-analysis. I came to the conclusion that perhaps my vertigo was related to caffeine. I cut back on coffee-and I’ve not had a vertigo attack since.
Two years later I gave up decaf as well.
My wife Tracy and I were attending Lamaze classes in preparation for the birth of our first baby-our son, Guy. One particular class we attended in May was about nutrition.
“And of course you all know not to drink coffee during your pregnancy, right?” the instructor asked.
My wife raised her hand.
“You mean caffeinated coffee, of course?” she replied.
“No,” the instructor shot back, “I mean any kind of coffee-caffeinated or decaffeinated.”
She then launched into a ten-minute diatribe about what’s wrong with decaffeinated coffee, listing all the chemicals in it. By the end of her speech, I was in shock. I was sure we had maimed the baby by drinking decaffeinated coffee during the last six months. Guy was born healthy, but I walked out of the Lamaze class shaken-and I’ve not had a sip of coffee, decaffeinated or otherwise, since that day 25 years ago.
Marina Kushner, founder of the Caffeine Awareness Association, agrees that decaf coffee is harmful.
“According to researchers,” she said in a recent press release, “decaf coffee increases the risk of heart attack, raises bad cholesterol, increases the risk of glaucoma and may lead to increased incidence of rheumatoid arthritis. And it still contains caffeine.”
For me the risk just isn’t worth it. And quite frankly, the last thing I need in the morning, or at any time of day for that matter, is a stimulant. I’m already wired from the moment my feet hit the floor. And while I realize there have been advances and that it’s probably now possible to have coffee or tea that’s both decaffeinated and toxin-free, I’ve simply said to myself, “Hey, I can live without it.”
The truth is, I have enough vices already. I don’t need to add coffee to the list.
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