Caffeine Qualms, Calmed Quaffers Who’ve Quit : Possible Health Dangers Cause Many to Curtail Regular Coffee Drinking

The Thanksgiving dinner at the Pasadena home of Joe Coulombe was nearing its conclusion, and most of the assembled 17 feasters were adding an exclamation point with the traditional cup of coffee.

For all of them, at the insistence of the host, it was the decaffeinated kind. It might tell you something that he happens to be president of Trader Joe’s, one of Southern California’s largest sellers of whole coffee beans.

One by one, as each succeeding report comes in on the possible health dangers of caffeine, individuals are cutting back drastically on their consumption of regular coffee--stopping it altogether, or switching to decaf, to tea or to health-food drink substitutes.

“I have measured out my life with coffee spoons,” wrote T. S. Eliot. Nowadays, not so much so.

Little wonder that its nickname is mud. Somewhere along the line it was ground.

“Until about two years ago I drank anywhere from 10 to 14 cups of black coffee a day,” Jill Halverson recalled. “I would be jittery in the afternoon. I would find myself awake at 2 a.m.

“I finally identified the problem as caffeine. I switched to decaf, and I became calm and slept well. Then, for some reason, about two months ago I developed an interest in diet colas. The insomnia returned. Took me 10 days to identify the problem again.

“Now I drink strictly herb tea or a glass of water. I drink a lot more water than I used to.”

Eight years ago Halverson founded the Downtown Women’s Center on Skid Row. For five years before that she had worked with male alcoholics in that location.

“They drink a lot of coffee as a social substitute while trying to stay sober. We always had a coffee maker on hand, and I would usually have a cup while we talked. I found out it accomplishes more socially than it does physiologically.

The Times and Herb Tea

“When I stopped drinking caffeinated coffee, I couldn’t imagine what the morning would be like without it. At home I used to get up at 6 a.m., immediately put on the coffee pot and read the paper while I drank. My routine now is The Times and herb tea.”

The bean goes on. Go to any chic luncheon and you’ll find the would-be slim sipping “decaf au lait” in lieu of dessert.

No special name inside homes, but the story is similar. In Reseda, Annie Damon said she used to consume more than 12 cups of coffee a day.

“I was nervous all the time. I would average only three or four hours of sleep a night. I would get heart palpitations.”

When she finally consulted a doctor, he knew what the problem was. She went to decaf, and has only about four cups of that a day.

“I don’t miss my former coffee at all,” she said. “It was just a stimulant, just a habit, just something to have during klatches with the neighbors. I found that decaf is something you have to develop a taste for, but I feel healthier now, and I sleep well.”

The tempting tonic, the beckoning brew. The wisecrack is that somebody has a temperament that would make coffee nervous. If you want to hear someone who really has strong feelings on not being the type, lend an ear to Joe Molina of Woodland Hills.

Frowns at Pritikin

“About nine cups a day was common for me. Then a year ago I went to the Pritikin Longevity Center, where they frown on caffeine in general.

“I had been in the habit of reading late into the night, keeping up with trends, all the while swilling coffee to stay alert. It was a cycle. The next morning I had to have more coffee because I was so tired from the lack of sleep.

“I came to realize that caffeine was probably putting me on the road to insanity. I mean it. I’ve seen people affected so much by it that they become frantic, with a touch of paranoia thrown in. It can make a person irrational.”

As was the recollection of many other former coffee imbibers interviewed, Molina said he had headaches for days after he withdrew. But he survived, and his only substitutes now are caffeine-free diet colas or herbal teas.

“I am able to concentrate more and make more rational decisions,” he said.

The onset of headaches after coffee withdrawal also was mentioned by Lyn Caulfield of San Marino, who said she used to drink probably 20 cups a day.

“I didn’t have any trouble sleeping at night, but I felt like going to bed at 3 in the afternoon,” she said.

“My doctor told me that much caffeine wasn’t good for me. He was also after me to give up smoking, so to keep him off my back I gave up the caffeine.

“For days I had splitting headaches. But that stopped, and now after my husband and I finish a pot in the morning, it’s a pot of decaffeinated for the rest of the day. Even though I really don’t think they’ve made a decaf that tastes as good as the regular.”

A convert with the same sentiments is Irene Wohlers, health assistant at Santa Monica High School. “I switched to the decaffeinated at the suggestion of my doctor--and I probably won’t go back to the old habit--but I miss the real coffee.

‘Eight a Day--Black’

“I am of Norwegian ancestry and I am used to a good cup of coffee. I liked about eight cups a day, straight black. About two years ago I was having difficulty going to sleep. That’s when I had to make the change.

“The only exception I make is perhaps at a restaurant on a weekend with my husband. I feel I can treat myself to a cup of the real stuff.”

It isn’t easy, this giving up of the old habit. After reading of the latest damning report, journalist Richard Cohen was moved to write:

“I no longer smoke. I use almost no salt. I haven’t had an egg in years, and I don’t hardly drink booze no more. I run in the mornings, sometimes work out in the afternoon and won’t sit in the dangerous summer sun, even though it makes me look healthy and handsome.

“I am, I swear, nearly perfect, but God--are you listening, God?--I need my coffee.”

The thing that rattled his cage was a report last month by scientists from the Johns Hopkins Medical School, who said that a coffee user who drinks five or more cups a day is almost three times as likely to have heart problems as someone who drinks no coffee.

The university coffee study covered up to 37 years and involved 1,130 white male medical students who graduated between 1948 and 1964. Information (no distinction was made between caffeinated or decaf) was collected via questionnaires at five-year intervals, one of the longest continuous health studies of Americans.

The hint of a link between coffee and heart disease--although preliminary and not regarded as evidence warranting change in dietary habits--was given in Washington at the annual scientific meeting of the American Heart Assn.

Unpublished, Unreviewed

“The Johns Hopkins report is an unpublished study which hasn’t yet undergone peer review,” countered Bill Brooks, spokesman for the National Coffee Assn., an industry trade group in New York City.

“The bulk of the medical literature doesn’t support a finding that coffee is a risk factor in the development of heart disease,” he said by phone.

“In recent years there have been 12 major studies on coffee and heart attack, and 10 of them found no association. Of the two that did, one was criticized by other scientists. The findings of the second were later revised by the researchers who had conducted the study.”

Whether or not there is a connection, the fact is that coffee consumption in America isn’t what it used to be.

Two months ago, in the latest reporting period, the International Coffee Organization in London said that during the winter of 1984-85:

--Americans who drink coffee consumed 3.33 cups a day, compared with 4.17 cups in 1963. Per capita, that amounted to 1.83 cups daily against 3.12.

U.S. Ranks Eighth

When Americans say gimme a break, it isn’t always coffee anymore. Perhaps surprisingly, in terms of per-capita consumption of green coffee, the United States ranks eighth in the world, according to the Encyclopedia Americana. Ahead of us, in order, are Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands.

Things have come a long way since the stimulating qualities of the bean were discovered, reportedly in Ethiopia between the 1200s and 1400s, possibly by goats accidentally munching on the berries of shrubs they’d come across.

It isn’t clear how, but Arabia also is in the early historical picture, its inhabitants making use of coffee as a food, wine and medicine.

Ironically, inasmuch as headaches figure into this, the poet Alexander Pope (who lived to be 56) sought relief from them by inhaling coffee steam.

Is there life after coffee?

John Levin of Hollywood, a movie production executive, said that after being a five-cup-a-day man, he switched about two years ago to tea exclusively.

“Coffee started making me feel awful--almost like my whole metabolism was being accelerated,” he said. “All of a sudden your hands feel clammy and you feel overheated.

“And if you’re a smoker, as I am, I think you drink coffee partly because the hotness of it anesthetizes your throat. It makes the cigarette more pleasant. Cigarettes don’t go as well with tea, therefore I find myself smoking less.”

Hal Lieberman, a former printing pressman now from Westwood, is another convert to tea.

“Coffee used to be a ritualized part of my breakfast, then I would take a thermos of it to work and finish that, and I would have more at dinner.

Only at Intermission

“The publicity on health finally got to me, and now I find that herbal tea gives me the same lift. The only time I drink coffee now is if I’m at a theater and they have it in the lobby.”

Dorothy Pearson of Woodland Hills is another member of the club. “I was one of those who thought I could never start the day without a cup of coffee,” she said. “Now I can’t start the day without my jasmine.”

Another tea drinker is actor Dennis Weaver, who not only is a vegetarian but goes the herbal route now for health reasons in lieu of his coffee habit of years ago. “He drank at least 10 cups daily, much of it while waiting around on the set of the old ‘Gunsmoke’ television series,” said a spokesman for the actor.

Greek: ‘Strong Stuff’

Cosmos Kapantzos of Hawthorne is a native of Athens who was used to quaffing five cups of Greek-type coffee a day. “Believe me, that’s strong stuff,” he said.

A few years ago he began having heart trouble (he recently underwent bypass surgery) and switched to good old Lipton. “I don’t miss my old habit, it was just a bad one,” he philosophized.

Not that forgoing the once-traditional cups of Joe, cups of Java, is total bliss.

“I used to drink six to eight cups of coffee a day,” said television producer and writer Philip Saltzman of Westwood. “About two years ago I tried going to zero.

“I felt healthier, I was less jittery, I slept better--but I also became less creative. When I wanted to work, nothing happened. No ideas popped into my head.”

He said his wife, Caroline, also gave up the habit and--like so many of the others--both of them got headaches. “They were mild, pervasive headaches, and after a week or two they went away,” he said.

So did the nights of fighting the bed.

“I found myself getting better-quality sleep--more rest in fewer hours, no more of that feeling tired all day.”

As for the creativity quandary, Saltzman said he solved it by allowing himself one cup of instant coffee in the morning. “I find that works. It gets the ideas tumbling around in my head. When I work in the afternoon, I drink a diet cola, which carries me to dinner.”

Coffee Substitutes

The wife, however, goes to health food stores and buys coffee substitutes, such as a powdered instant drink from Switzerland which includes extracts from roots, grains and fruits and has a taste said to resemble that of coffee.

“She also drinks only decaffeinated coffee, and even that has to be the type done by the so-called Swiss water process.”

The reference is to something Coulombe is familiar with at his 24 Trader Joe’s specialty stores, where, in dollar volume, more than 50% of his coffee sales are the decaf type.

“We have lots of exotic types of coffee beans--such as from New Guinea, Zimbabwe, Sumatra, Jamaica--and all of them that are decaffeinated are done specifically for us in Switzerland by the water process. This extracts the caffeine solely with steam--no chemicals are used.”

The more common method in many commercial brands is the use of chemicals, such as methylene chloride, which some studies have claimed is a cancer-causing agent in mice, although federal health authorities have answered that there is no evidence of hazards to humans from such use of the chemicals.

Arabica vs. Robusta

“There are two types of coffee marketed--arabica and robusta,” explained Coulombe, who has an MBA from Stanford University. “Arabica has less natural caffeine and is more expensive. Robusta has more caffeine and is cheaper. It is the type generally used in the more popular instant coffees.

“And, obviously, if a manufacturer stipulates that a decaffeinated brand is mainly from arabica beans, you are better off. The remaining 1% of caffeine is 1% of a smaller amount to begin with.”

Everything taken into consideration, however, coffee has been and remains a popular drink throughout the world.

The 19th-Century novelist Honore de Balzac (who lived to be 51) was said to be virtually a coffee drunkard, consuming 20 to 30 cups daily.

One of the devotees of the hot brown drink was the 18th-Century philosopher Francois Voltaire, who lived to age 84. Upon being told that the brew was a slow poison, his reply was that it must be very slow indeed, because he had been drinking it almost 80 years.”