Tea and Coffee Habits

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Jan 10, 1911

Tea and Coffee Habits

The following is a comment on tea and coffee, taken from a recent number of the Literary Digest: "A warning against the evils of tea and coffee looks odd in the pages of The Tea and Coffee Trade Journal; yet such an article, from the pen of the famous Dr. Harvey W. Wiley, Chief of the Bureau of Chemistry of the United States Department of Agriculture, appears in that paper. Dr. Wiley believes it to be the duty of the trade to see that tea and coffee are not used to excess; if not, he says, prohibitionists may tackle these drinks next, after drowning old King Alcohol."

Dr. Wiley states in the article mentioned that many parents forbid the use of tea and coffee to their children, and he thinks it is a wise precaution. "I do not think," he writes, "there is any danger of interfering with the health or nutrition of the child by abstinence from drinks of this kind; on the other hand, it appears to me there is danger of permitting the child to form a habit, because coffee and tea drinking are to a certain extent habits, and I think caffein is recognized as one of the habit-forming drugs." As to a grown person, he believes that the moment a man feels he is becoming a slave to either he should call a halt, and that if giving up tea or coffee produces malaise, headache, incapacity for work, and a general disturbance of the health, the victim may know that he has gone too far. A still wiser plan would be to banish these beverages entirely. Neither tea nor coffee is needed, and the use of both is harmful.