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Gustav III of Sweden's Coffee Experiment

103 points| mmastrac | 6 years ago |en.wikipedia.org

31 comments

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[+] eitland|6 years ago|reply
Thanks for posting, this brings back happy childhood memories :

When I was a kid I used to follow my dad around the farm while he was milking the cows and doing farm work.

He told a lot of stories like this (including the details about the doctors and the king dying first). Other times he told me about scientific studies he had read about etc. I can clearly remember him talking about omega3 in the mid 90ies, way before it became popular around here at least, because I remember asking a particular teacher about it.

(He is now a teacher and enjoys it. I bet his students do too :-)

Edit: I sent the link and he just replied. He read it in a book but sadly that book had less details, not more.

Edit 2: FWIW here is a a page from nih.gov: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5355814/

It to still light on the details though, and I don't have time to check all the references now.

[+] emersonrsantos|6 years ago|reply
As with all drugs, it's not understood the paradoxical drug effects. Stimulants can make people sleepy, and the most potent of benzodiazepamines can make one more agressive. The endocrine system (also the immune system) is so complex and so full of variables and network effects that I think that science has a long way ahead for a precise scientific understanding of all the positive and negative effects of these drug categories.
[+] skinkestek|6 years ago|reply
This is a really weird topic! For example, I understand that Ritalin is used mostly as a stimulant and can be used to treat some cases of narcolepsy.

But, according to a psychiatric doctor I spoke to, some people take it to help them fall asleep.

[+] eirini1|6 years ago|reply
if stimulants make you sleepy you may have ADHD, just saying you might wanna look into that.
[+] schoen|6 years ago|reply
The first time that I ever tried yerba mate, I immediately fell asleep and slept for two to three hours!

(Of course, I was also jetlagged, so I'm not sure whether it was actually an effect of the mate.)

[+] _0ffh|6 years ago|reply
Reading it, I first thought: "Twin study, cool!"

Then I thought, "What? Two experiments, but no control group? How disappointing!" :)

[+] grenoire|6 years ago|reply
Considering the levels of consumption, you could assume that tea drinking is the control!
[+] duxup|6 years ago|reply
>the tea drinker was the first to die, at age 83;

For being condemned criminals it sounds like they were well cared for.

Also what are the odds of finding condemned twins?

[+] freepor|6 years ago|reply
If they committed crimes together, not hard. If things like political crimes can be punished by death, even easier. If the king says “get me a pair of identical twins condemned to death” very easy. Go into a poor neighborhood, find a pair of twins and drag them in on an unsolved murder.
[+] vilhelm_s|6 years ago|reply
Yeah, the cited pages don't seem to have any scholarly references, and one of them notes that "the authenticity of the story has been questioned", so I rather doubt it.
[+] antonvs|6 years ago|reply
> the date of death of the surviving coffee drinker is unknown.

Apparently 3 pots of coffee a day makes you immortal.

[+] taneq|6 years ago|reply
A simple application of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. After the third pot, you're so focused on your velocity that your location can no longer be determined to be in either the land of the living or the land of the dead.
[+] toohotatopic|6 years ago|reply
No control group without tea or coffee?
[+] eitland|6 years ago|reply
First: remember this is 250 or so years ago.

Secondly you could say that everyone else was the control group as this king taxed tea and coffe and later outlawed at least coffee entirely.

Edit: according to some sources it was his dad who first introduced steep taxes on tea and coffee.

[+] taneq|6 years ago|reply
What kind of monster would suggest such a thing?! :P
[+] fapjacks|6 years ago|reply
This is quintessential Swedish sense of humor, the doctors AND the king dying before either of the twins.
[+] zepto|6 years ago|reply
Questioning the value of coffee leads to death.
[+] peter_d_sherman|6 years ago|reply
Great Article!

You know, arguably (and I'm sure historians will differ on this!), but arguably, this is sort of like the Swedish version of Prohibition (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibition_in_the_United_Stat...) -- except with Coffee, and except occuring in 1794, some 126 years or so before Prohibition...

Ya know what I want to see?

Somewhere, somewhere in obscure Swedish history, there has to be a version of the U.S.'s Boston Tea Party (1773) -- except occuring with, and solely on behalf of, you guessed it: Coffee...

<g>

(Oh yeah, and to any detractors out there in the HN Community without a sense of humor, feel free to downvote! I have enough HN Karma, I can take it! Hey, I thought it was funny! <g>)

Hmm... Maybe there should be a political party, U.S. and/or Swedish... "The Coffee Party"... (ok, that was overstepping my bounds, yes, that would deserve a downvote! <g>)