(no subject)

A new concept of the body was then emerging in the West to take the place of the humoral system, one based not on the balance of fluids but on cycles of input and output. The analogy was no longer a scale but an engine.

The crux of this shift was the discovery, in part through analysis of steam engines, of energy: the overarching force unifying what had been thought of as discrete phenomena, including motion, heat and light.
...
By 1900, the new science of nutrition had applied thermodynamics to human physiology via the calorie, a unit of measure that expressed the needs and abilities of the body in common terms—inputs and outputs, food and work. On its own, the calorie didn’t resolve questions about coffee, which contains very few calories per cup. But the calorie did provide a stable framework for understanding coffee’s physiological effects since it made work look like the basic function and natural condition of a living body, much like an engine. This ascendant biology of drudgery informed a new consensus on coffee: It was lubricant for the “human machine.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-coffee-became-a-modern-necessity-11585972861

A superficial "scientific" narrative provides a convincing explanation of something that works without revealing the underlying physiology.