On coffee. And poo.

The effects of coffee are many and splendorous.  I, like many people the world over, am hopelessly addicted to java to the point of getting extreme headaches if I don’t drink a cup within about an hour of getting out of bed.  I am definitely physiologically hooked and even more so psychologically addicted to the stuff.  In fact, I can think of few things more comforting than a hot coffee after a nice evening meal, ideally on a patio with a lake or mountain view…. or more realistically probably sitting in front of the TV watching something on the food network.  Nevertheless, the point remains: without the glory of coffee I would be in serious trouble.

But not all of coffee’s effects are necessarily immediately desirable.  Has anyone else noticed that drinking a coffee makes a trip to the bathroom much more… urgent?  Coffee definitely makes you have to poo.  And for my whole life up until this point I had merely accepted the fact without overly questioning the underlying bodily mechanics, perhaps summing it up to the stimulating effects of caffeine.  For whatever reason, today I felt like I had to do a little bit of research to gain some insight into this phenomenon.

One fellow on a message board had this to say:

Caffeine inhibits an enzyme that is thought to regulate mucosal secretions in your small intestine. Secretions go up, so fluid in your bowel goes up, and if the amount of fluid in your colon is greater than the amount of fluid you can reabsorb, splat, you get diarrhea, or at least looser stools.

According to the Bowel Movement Guide, caffeine causes your gastrocolic reflex to trigger more readily, thereby pushing that future poo from the colon into the rectum.  Seems like a pretty simple explanation.

That’s about as far as 15 minutes of looking around got me.

On a related note, feel like a $50 cup of coffee?  Look no further than the litter box.  Yep – Indonesian cat poo coffee!  It’s apparently about the rarest and most expensive coffee available, extracted from the feces of Indonesian civet cats (which coincidentally happen to be related to the SARS outbreak).  “When roasted, the resulting beans sell for around $1,000 a kilogram ($450 a pound) and brew into a earthy, syrupy, coffee acknowledged by connoisseurs as one of the world’s finest.”

Just when you think you’ve heard it all, cat SARS poo coffee.

On the topic of coffee, apparently it’s the number 1 source of antioxidants for most folks.  “Nothing comes close,” not even red wine and beer, which are both in the top 10 list after coffee.  For those that might be curious, antioxidants are “thought to provide health benefits in preventing diseases such as heart disease and cancer by fighting cellular damage caused by free radicals in the body.”  Worth a disruption in your natural digestion? Up to you, I suppose.