In preparing for office hours, Brad dialectically downs 40 ounces of Coke.
Thrasymakhos: Ah. Proof that demand for some commodities is effectively unbounded!
Glaukon: What are you talking about?
Thrasymakhos: Diet coke. You’re buying two bottles of diet coke. And not just two normal bottles. Two 20 oz. bottles. That’s 40 oz. of diet coke you’re buying, at once.
Glaukon: It’s not diet coke.
Thrasymakhos: It isn’t?
Glaukon: It’s real coke.
Thrasymakhos: Why?
Glaukon: I have three straight hours of office hours ahead of me. I need the caffeine. I need the blood sugar.
It’s my experience that he’d have been better off with the Diet. Today I sat through a four-hour meeting followed by a one-hour meeting followed by three and a half hours of office hours (the students have a paper due next week). Espressos, breve lattes, and Diet Cokes were the order of the day. The blood sugar spike from the regular Coke, even from rather a lot of regular Coke (and 40 oz. doesn’t yet begin to qualify as ‘a lot’ on a day like that) disappears much faster than the caffeine effect, and the subsequent sugar crash is harder to shake than the comedown from caffeine. I can go through eleven or twelve hours never really crashing from caffeine; I just have some more. Sugar doesn’t, as far as I can tell, work like that; you’re going to pay for the spike with crashes pretty regularly through the day even if you keep chugging. If you need blood sugar, eat something– and something that’s not all sugar.
Disclaimer for my students: Professor Levy’s level of caffeine intake is not medically recommended and should not be emulated. His tolerance is at an appallingly high level, and therefore his intake does not interfere with his getting eight-plus hours of sleep per night. You all have an alarming tendency not to get eight hours of sleep per night, and this is not good. Coffee is a wonderful, wonderful thing but is not a substitute for sleep…
UPDATE: Keith Whittington, the distinguished public law scholar at Princeton, writes in:
I noticed your blog on the relative merits of Diet Coke as a stimulant. I recently discovered the interesting fact that most diet sodas also have more caffeine than the regular varieties. Coke Classic is 34 mg, for example, but Diet Coke is 45.6. Pepsi One is up there with Mountain Dew. Diet Dr. Pepper is the outlier in having the same (relatively high) caffeine content as the regular. Of course, all sodas pale in comparison to coffee. See http://wilstar.com/caffeine.htm.
A few people wrote in to ask for details about my own intake. Taking yesterday as an example– it was a bit unrepresentative because of the dayful of meetings, but not by any means a radical outlier– and using the numbers on the caffeine chart linked to above:
8 am. Triple espresso. 300 mg.
8:30 am. Breve latte with an extra shot (i.e. a triple espresso with steamed half-and-half). 300 mg.
10:45 am. Diet Coke. 45 mg.
12 noon. 1 cup brewed coffee. c. 100 mg.
2:30 pm. Diet Coke. 45 mg.
3:30 pm. Dan suggests we take a quick break from office hours and get a snack. He gets a Toll House brownie bar. I get another triple espresso. 300 mg.
With dinner: Diet Dr. Pepper. 41 mg.
Total: 1131 mg.
As I look at this I realize this isn’t by any means the most caffeine I might have in a day. Because I was tied down to office hours and meetings I didn’t step out for Diet Cokes as often as I sometimes do. Because the meetings start so early I didn’t brew myself a pot of coffee at home, from which I might easily have 4-5 cups some days. Already today I’ve had four shots of espresso and the equivalent of three cups of coffee. (Had breakfast at the faculty club, where coffee gets served in silly little teacups, which makes it hard to get an accurate count.)
As I said: not recommended. It’s fun, though. I’d worry more about my addiction if it weren’t such a pleasant one– or if I ever got jittery or shaky, or if I ever lay awake at night.
Comments are closed.