I read somewhere that excessive caffeine leads to bone loss and in a separate article, that endurance bikers and runners tended to have lower bone density. With work causing me to ingest copious amounts of coffee, and having taken up long distance walking and running, I was eager to see how the lifestyle changes impacted my body. So it was back to vist my buddies at the university human performance lab. Their Lunar DEXA scanner is an incredible tool. A small pattering of xrays measures every nook and cranny of the body, providing data on skeletal bone density, aggregate lean mass by region, and even trends in these data over multiple scans. The procedure was a breeze. I lay on the table, they shifted me around into a cool superhero pose, and the machine thrummed to life. A six minute nap later, and the irradiated snapshot popped onto the screen. The test itself is worth the cool factor of the image-- it's not every day one sees his skeleton grinning back at him. The scan really provides the sense of the body as an awesome machine and, as the techs dissect the composition data, the feeling of being a breathing, talking guinea pig. I knew my bone density was going to take a hit. Want to know what 2 X-Large cups of coffee a day will do? If the above were you, your skeleton would have thinned out by 6%. Yowch! As always, lighter areas of the skeleton correspond with denser bones and according to the numbers, all that caffeine forces the body to protect the major stress bearing regions (ankles, femur, pelvis, and spine) at the expense of everything else. The arms and ribs, which had an incredible gain in density back in June from a lot of lifting, fell back into negative territory. For the shred of good news: lean mass remained consistent and fat dropped by a a good 1%. So all in all, running rocks. My heart looks and feels great and energy levels have been strong. Coffee is my necessary evil-- techie actually called me out on smuggling a coffee on the way over-- you can actually see it lurking under the heart and what looks like the liver. It's something I can't function in the mornings without and aside from a broken hip at age 40, the worst I can imagine is that there won't be as much of me for archaeologists to find in 100 years.

It is said that around the seventh century, somewhere near the Red Sea - whether it was Ethiopia or Yemen is a subject of debate - a herd of goats ate the magenta berries of a local shrub and began to act strangely. In a classic 1935 study called Coffee: The Epic of a Commodity, the German journalist Heinrich Eduard Jacob described their behavior thus: All night, for five nights in succession - nay, for seven or eight - they clambered over rocks, cutting capers, chasing one another, bleating fantastically. They turned their bearded heads hither and thither; with reddened eyes they gamboled convulsively when they caught sight of the goatherds, and then they darted off swift as arrows speeding from the bow. Having observed the frisky goats, the imam of a nearby monastery - a sort of medieval Carlos Castaneda - roasted the berries in a chafing dish, crushed them in a mortar, mixed them with boiling water, and drank the brew. When he lay down, he couldn't sleep. His heartbeat quickened, his limbs felt light, his mood became cheerful and alert. "He was not merely thinking," wrote Jacob. "His thoughts had become concretely visible. He watched them from the right side and from the left, from above and from below. They raced like a team of horses." The imam found that he could juggle a dozen ideas in the time it normally took to consider a single one. His visual acuity increased; in the glow of his oil lamp, the parchment on his table looked unusually lustrous and the robe that hung on a nearby peg seemed to swell with life. He felt strengthened, as Jacob put it, "by heavenly food brought to him by the angels of Paradise." from 'At Large and At Small: Confessions of a Literary Hedonist' , Anne Fadiman