Postum - How's your flower?

If you're tired, it may be because you drink.. too much coffee?? Say what?

The illustration in this ad kind of seems like the sort of thing they'd use to sell "feminine solutions", with the flower as a visual metaphor for one's freshness, but it's just about caffeine crashing.

It is possible that "riding the white pony" for a while can leave you drained from all the chemically induced go-power, if you've hit the coffee tureen hard enough. Just like anything that picks you up must let you down eventually. If you ask me, the smart money's on smoothing out that crash by easing down the caffeine crank with maybe some tea or a nice sodey pop.

Here's a decent  article on the subject from WebMD. Surprise! The long and short of it is that, yeah, you're going to come down after the rush. The stronger the up, the stronger the down. There are no free rides.

Side note: A quick Google search of "too much coffee low energy" is a cattle call for everyone trying to convince you that caffeine is a terrible poison that wants to kill you and shit in your shirt drawer. If you want something unbiased and evidence-based (meaning, the scientific consensus), as opposed to hyperbolic woo, you'd be wisest not to even bother clicking on the first link from "naturalnews", or the other one from "caffeineinformer". You know what you're going to get from them just from reading their URLs. They have an ideology to push on you, and probably a book to sell you. If you're looking for an echo chamber that feeds into your sense of paranoia, do your search however you like, of course.

Anyway, going cold turkey is a livable long-term solution, once you're off the stuff. This Postum ad makes it seem as if Postum gives you energy, which is a lie - or as an advertising person would call it, "talking".

So what does Postum give you? Well, Wikipedia's a decent source of non-controversial information (I wouldn't trust it for the straight dope on, say, the Arab-Israeli hootenanny that's bee rocking for a couple thousand years). The Wikipedia entry says...

a powdered roasted-grain beverage once popular as a coffee substitute. The caffeine-free beverage was created by Postum Cereal Company founder C. W. Post in 1895 and marketed as a healthful alternative to coffee.[1]:93 The Postum Cereal Company eventually became General Foods, which was bought by Kraft Foods. Post was a student of John Harvey Kellogg, who believed that caffeine was unhealthy.

Aaah, Kellogg. He was a piece of work. Even water is unhealthy in large enough doses, but the list of things on his "okey dokey list" included rectal electrocution. I'm sure it was intended to "stimulate the bowel" or whatever. Granted, that was the 1800s, and few people had a firm grip on the scientific method back then. Kellogg was really into your bowel. He loved flushing people out with water and on occasion, yogurt.

Kellogg also had some rather puritanical views on masturbation. Some of his therapies involved applying carbolic acid to the clitoris to prevent women from any of that "harmful" masturbation. So, coffee bad, burning a lady's junk, a-ok. Got it. Thanks, John. Thanks for helping.  Ironically, a little bit of "me time" may have been just the thing to help Kellogg relax about the whole enema fixation and keep his mind out of everyone's poop chute, not to mention worrying about what women did with their "curious fingers". If you ask me, Kellogg is a fine example of someone who "doth protest too much", and I'm given to wonder what he got up to behind closed doors, after a long day of administering butt smoothies and napalming ladies' hoo-has.

They made a movie about him, which is really good and stars Matthew Broderick and Anthony Hopkins, The Road to Wellville. Holy crap! The whole thing is up on FaceTube! You can enjoy it over a nice iced coffee. That's my evening. See you.