Maté
Last week I stopped at the Whole Foods Market in Canoga Park on my way to work. In the store were company reps from the Guayakí company giving samples of a beverage called Yerba Maté. I had never heard of this before. It turns out that it is the leaf of a rainforest tree native to South America. Everything about maté and Guayakí is fascinating. Maté is psychoactive as hell. It is high in methylxanthines caffeine, theobromine, and theophylline, all of which are diuretic bronchodilatory stimulants. But there must be all sorts of other active compounds as well: it is calming, focusing, and slightly euphoric, but probably not enough to have it made illegal. It is an appetite suppressant and allegedly a minor analgesic.
Of course, once you find something new you start seeing it everywhere. I found a discussion on Metafilter from February that I must have read at the time. And it showed up in the book I am currently reading, Becoming Vegan, as being associated with esophageal cancer. This is obviously not desirable. I did some more searching online, and it turns out that the carcinogenic property might be due to its traditionally being drunk very, very hot. Apparently you see the same results with tea and coffee. And apparently consumption of vegetables, fresh fruits, black pepper, and turmeric are shown to have some protective effects against this type of cancer (also cheese, for the non-vegans.)
After a few hours, at least for me, the calming and euphoric effects wear off and you are left with a major case of the jitters. That’s not desirable either. I can’t get my leg to stop shaking right now, for instance, and my breathing is stuttered and broken. The jitters might cause one to take more maté in order to get the calming effects back, but this sounds like a feedback loop to me. I’ve read multiple pages that claim that maté is non-addictive, but this strikes me as absurd, as caffeine can form dependencies and maté is loaded with caffeine. I mean, no one is going to knock over a liquor store to support a caffeine habit, but there are certainly withdrawal and tolerance effects. Additionally, as Marion Howard writes, “caffeine perpetuates its own use by curing its own side effects, much like alcohol.” Maté may be doubly self-perpetuating, if ingesting more maté causes the jitters to subside (I’m not going to experiment with this today.)
But it’s delicious (some say it tastes like “wet hay”, which I think is unfair), and great with soy milk and sucanat as a vegan “maté latté”. And Guayakí have a great website; they also drip with every progressive cause you could possibly imagine: sustainability, fair trade, recycling, reforestation. They are so cause-obsessed that they almost seem a self-parody. But check them out: you might find the trip interesting.
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