caffeine

[Imogen]

mocha shakes are gross, bismark. groooooooss.

like a good half-iranian, i loooooooooove tea. it's s huge part of our culture. as a singer, i love tea because it relaxes my vocal chords. my favorite kind of tea happens to be an herbal tea. it has yummy spices in it. i HATE throat coat teas because they taste funny, but they're good for my voice so i force them down with lots of honey.

now that it's morning, i am FINALLY going to have some tea.

[NerdGirl]

In a somewhat-parallel but irrelevant case, my brother-in-law loves O'Doul's. And my dad drinks non-alcoholic wine...fancy grape juice, I guess?

My grandpa used to drink O'Doul's. My brother tried a sip of one when he was about 7, and he was so grossed out by it that I think he actually threw up.

[Dragon Lady]

My dad got addicted to caffeine really badly. He got hooked on Mountain Dew on his mission and brought a bunch back (because they didn't have it in Idaho yet) and then a few years later started getting headaches and only Excedrin would work. It got to the point that he'd have to drink at least a bottle or two of Mountain Dew and take 6 Excedrin every day lest he got a horrible headache. Finally he realized it was the caffeine in both and decided to go off cold turkey. He was miserable for days, but then was fine. He's never had caffeine since (except in maybe chocolate) and we weren't allowed to have caffeinated drinks at home, either. I'm a little paranoid about addictions now, too, and probably won't allow my kids to drink caffeine either.

[ahem.]

One time I thoughtlessly let my 3-year-old niece down a Coke while I was babysitting, even though my sister never lets her kids drink anything caffeinated.

The joke was on me, though, when I had to stay up all night with her when she wouldn't go to sleep.

[Gimgimno]

There was a point in my mission where I had to drink a Dr Pepper before study every morning or else it was impossible to function. I realized that it was getting a bit unhealthy when I caught myself letting the soda fizz under my tongue and burn before I swallowed it. Yeahhhhhhh. So I laid out some rules for myself in drinking it (never before 10am, two at most a day, etc.), and I think it's all completely under control, now. I would drink the caffeine free stuff, but 1) it's generally more expensive, and 2) without caffeine as the bittering agent, it's too sweet. But like I said, I don't think there's any problems with my drinking habits now, so I drink it guiltlessly.

[Dead Cat]

I remember one of my professors citing decaf coffee as not being against the WoW, but he may have been being facetious (he did that a lot).

[Laser Jock]

The funny thing about decaf coffee is that it totally has caffeine still, and it's not in vanishing quantities either: it has about 1/10th as much as normal coffee, which is much less, but still there. (For a fairly thorough list of the caffeine content of various drinks, see here. You might try sorting by mg of caffeine per ounce of drink.)

Personally, I think coffee and tea are what's meant by the Word of Wisdom, as has already been pointed out. It doesn't matter, as far as I can tell, whether the coffee or tea has caffeine: the Word of Wisdom doesn't say caffeine, it says hot drinks, which has been clarified as coffee and tea. (Likewise, I think excessive use of caffeine from other sources is against the spirit of the Word of Wisdom, as are any other addictive substances, but drinking the occasional caffeinated soda isn't a problem.)

And following up on the tea debate: to me tea, when used without any modifiers, refers to any drink made from Camellia sinensis, and not to any of a variety of drinks made from other plants. (Does anyone have any evidence that the term "tea" commonly meant anything else in the 1830s?) Thus, it would include black, green, white, and oolong tea (etc.), but not herbal tea.

[Yarjka]

Red tea (or Rooibos) is not from the tea plant, and is now my tea of choice, although more because I like the taste of it, and not because of its non-tea status.

I grew up drinking all sorts of herbal teas, but I guess it was just a taste I acquired that others didn't. [just a tip for those of you that haven't tried it: You can make your hot chocolate amazing by steeping some peppermint in it].

I do think it most probable that the Word of Wisdom means precisely 'all drinks served at a high temperature' when it says 'hot drinks'; however, I also believe that this guideline has been reinterpreted by later prophets to mean now only "coffee and tea." I just think that by tea, they mean 'tea', and not 'all herbal infusions'.

[Whistler]

I like Rooibos too and I recommend it. Especially with a little milk.

[thebigcheese]

I think my fiance told me that Coke is cheaper than water in South America...thus, everyone drinks Coke. Including the missionaries and mission president.

[Craig Jessop]

Even in the U.S. Spanish people insist upon giving you soda, even if you beg for water. At first it was awesome, but then it got really, really old. I guess it must be cultural.

[Humble Master]

I think my fiance told me that Coke is cheaper than water in South America...thus, everyone drinks Coke. Including the missionaries and mission president.

In Mexico Coke was not cheaper than water, but it was always certain to be clean, which the water was not. So if you were offered Coke or water, our instructions were to take the Coke.

[Kissables]

I've never had a caffeinated soda, mainly because it's taboo in my family, and throughout most of the members of my stake at home. Now that I'm on my own, I can't say that I'm totally against the idea. It seems to be more of a cultural thing than a doctrinal thing.

I am a heavy user of excedrin though. Tylenol and ibuprofen really do nothing for me on their own. I thought about trying to take a single tylenol with a caffeinated soda to decrease my intake of aspirin, but it seemed too much of a hassle, and I don't like most dark sodas, which seem to be the majority of the ones with caffeine. I usually have 2 sodas a month at most, so avoiding caffeinated sodas were never a big issue for me.

Our family isn't against caffeine itself, it just seems to be caffeinated beverages.

[Marduk]

Our family isn't against caffeine itself, it just seems to be caffeinated beverages.

Yeah, this seems to be the CW. It has always struck me as odd; why is it problematic if I get a few milligrams of caffeine in my coke, but not so problematic if I get it say, in my chocolate?

Anyway, These are points I've rambled on ad nauseum already in this thread, so I'll shut up.

[TheBlackSheep]

Just because of the population I work with, I feel the need to say that what people have described on this forum is probably better characterized as caffeine dependence than addiction. There's a really big difference between those two words, though of course it's not good to be dependent on a drug, either.

When I was growing up, my wonderful, wonderful mom would absolutely not allow us to have any kind of caffeinated beverages. We weren't even allowed to have their non-caffeinated equivalents (say, caffeine-free Dr. Pepper) because maybe we'd learn to like it, and then we'd be at a restaurant someday and they wouldn't have the caffeine free version available and we all know what a slippery slope it is to fully caffeinated Dr. Pepper (HOLY DELICIOUSNESS).