Recently, I decided to cut back on my caffeine intake. One day my wife and I were at a restaurant and I ordered a diet coke. After the waitress left, I remembered that I was reducing my caffeine intake and that coke has quite a bit. When the waitress came back by, I motioned to her and requested that she change my order. I told her that I didn’t want the coke because I was reducing my caffeine intake. Then I said, “I’ll have a chocolate shake instead.”
My wife and the waitress both looked at each other and raised their eyebrows, but said nothing for a moment. When I realized that I was missing something, I asked what was going on. The waitress said, “Chocolate contains caffeine.”
I was floored! I had never heard about this. Chocolate has caffeine in it?! My mind reeled, the way my mind does when I hear something for the first time at 50+, that apparently the entire rest of the population of the planet has understood as common knowledge for some time. I didn’t even have a response. I ordered water and let the waitress go about her business. I stared at the wall, then the floor and then the ceiling. I was flabbergasted. How did the caffeine get in there?
I began a conversation with my very patient wife about this. I reasoned that caffeine came from a coffee plant and chocolate from a cacao plant. How does the caffeine get from one plant to the other? I decided that it was not possible that chocolate contained caffeine because of this “two plant” problem. I had lunch and then went home and began to research the issue. I found out that there is no caffeine in chocolate and that there is a very prominent and highly believed myth that chocolate contains caffeine. The truth is that it does have a natural stimulant that is like caffeine, but it is not caffeine. I found one website on the internet that even referred to the belief that there is caffeine in chocolate as a very pervasive “urban myth”.
Urban myths are those thoughts and ideas that people collectively hold as true, even if they are not. They are passed from one person to the next, one generation to the next as if they were true. They are akin to the “old wives tales.”
One of the most interesting aspects of these urban myths, is how widespread the beliefs are and how nearly impossible they are to debunk. For every one person that you show the truth to, it seems that ten hear and believe the myth as if it were truth. It plays into another commonly held belief, “How could so many people be wrong or deceived?”
Matthew 7:22-24 – “Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name? “And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’ “Therefore whoever hears these sayings of Mine, and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on the rock. Many will say that they know and operate on God’s behalf, in His Name, when they truly are not. If you read these passages in the Bible, you get the impression that no one is more surprised by this than the ones that declared that they were doing things in the Lord’s Name. They were not necessarily trying to deceive anyone. They were themselves deceived and didn’t understand the truth. But I’ll bet they spoke like they knew, truly knew. God is the Word and the Word is truth, let it be your guide and protect you from the deception of urban myths. Blessings!

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