The best advertising campaign in the long history of advertising campaigns isn’t from Apple, Budweiser, or Nike. No, for that we must give it up for the National Coffee Association for its 1984 effort “Coffee Achievers”. Where else could you get David Bowie, Kurt Vonnegut, Cicely Tyson, Pat Benatar, Cincinnati Bengal quarterback Ken Anderson, and the music of Electric Light Orchestra in one ad? Truly a high-water mark in marketing. And to those who laughed at the thought of accomplishment through our rich brewed nectar, a new story in the New York Times says, “Pffffftttt.”

When it comes to sports performance, coffee kicks ass. Now, this is nothing you and I didn’t already know. Every one of my road cycling routes has caffeine stations built in (and so do my mountain bike loops, come to think of it). But the Times has done some real journalism and dredged up lab-coated scientists to put the stamp of legitimacy on the whole affair.

“Caffeine, it turns out, actually works. And it is legal, one of the few performance enhancers that is not banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency,” writes Gina Kolata. Kolata, it must be said, surely must get sick of people saying, “Piña? Piña Colada?”

For a while, researchers thought coffee enabled your muscles to burn fat, which saved valuable glycogen stores for later. Not so: Caffeine releases calcium from your muscles, giving you more power. In that lab, performance jumps 20 to 25 percent, though in the real world the bump is only 5 percent—still plenty good.

Coffee/feine also talks to your brain to suppress feelings of exhaustion, increasing endurance. Um, duh.

“There is so much data on this that it’s unbelievable. It’s just unequivocal that caffeine improves performance. It’s been shown in well-respected labs in multiple places around the world,” said Dr. Mark Tarnopolsky of Canada’s McMaster University.

All righty, no more poaching of the Times piece. Read it all here. And hold on tight to your dreams.

Tagged as: health, science