A new study being heavily covered in the news this week suggests heavy drinkers who consume the beverage more than 3 times a day may not actually enjoy the drink. This raised our collective eyebrows at Bartalks, so we looked into it.
Researchers at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena in Germany tested both groups of heavy coffee drinkers and low to moderate drinkers as part of their investigation into caffeine addiction.
The study did not say whether they differentiated the groups of coffee drinkers into those that drank it because it was habitual versus those that drink coffee because they are aficionados.
They found classic signs of addiction as heavy coffee drinkers had a stronger desire for the beverage without actually liking or getting more satisfaction from it.
758305075
Excessive coffee consumption leads to caffeine addiction in a similar way to other drugs, like cocaine. After all, caffeine is a stimulant and continuation of regular caffeine use may produce withdrawal symptoms.
The substance forces the brain to crave the trigger it has become reliant on, but there is no increase in the amount of satisfaction it provides.
Those in our industry, probably know people who drink low quality coffee because of the ‘pick up’ factor. In this light, the study perhaps makes more sense.
Friedrich Schiller, Researcher at the University Jena in Germany said,
The data confirms that heavy coffee consumption is associated with strong wanting despite low liking for coffee, indicating that wanting becomes independent from liking through repeated consumption of caffeine.
‘This dissociation provides a possible explanation for the widespread and stable consumption of caffeine-containing beverages.’
THE STUDY
Researchers used 24 heavy consumers, who drank coffee at least three times a day and 32 people low or none coffee drinkers for the experiment.
They wanted to find out the dissociation of ‘wanting‘ and ‘liking‘ between the 2 test groups with newly developed and validated response time-based assessment procedures.
The 2 groups completed 2 versions of the Implicit-Association Test (IAT), which is usually used to assess unconscious biases relating to race or gender, but used one of which has been developed and validated recently to assess ‘wanting’ for coffee and the other for ‘liking’.
THE RESULTS
The team found, as expected, heavy frequent coffee drinkers showed a higher level of desire for the beverage.
The researchers say,
Habitual consumers of relatively high levels of coffee (at least three cups a day) differed from low/no coffee drinkers to a much stronger degree in wanting coffee.
The results suggest that heavy coffee drinkers differ from low/non-consumers by displaying increased wanting, but not liking, for coffee.
Researchers say caffeine shares similar properties with other drugs, such as alcohol or even Class A drugs like cocaine.
‘They say, ‘Dissociation of wanting and liking have been observed with a wide range of drugs in animals,’
‘The main difference between highly addictive drugs (eg, alcohol or cocaine) and substances with lower addictive strength (eg, caffeine) may mainly be a quantitative rather than a qualitative one.’
There was less of a difference between the groups when taking into account IAT results for ‘liking’ coffee, the data revealed.
