From the late nineteenth century, coffee substitutes with alleged health-promoting effects were a frequently advertised commodity in the Swedish press. This chapter argues that competing manufacturers used a range of arguments to establish the conception that health was a choice made by conscious and rational middle-class individuals and illness, thus, was the consequence of not choosing reconciling arguments of everyday economic rationality, science, motherhood and civic duty in regard to the national economy. Advertisements targeted women, as keepers of the household economy, as major coffee consumers and as mothers of supposedly coffee-drinking children. Not choosing Swedish coffee substitutes was seen to hurt the economic independence of Sweden and created unnecessary nervous disorders and weak citizens. Physicians and politicians raised their voices against what they perceived as an increased abuse of coffee to such a level that it was politicised the years before the First World War. Nonetheless, despite these efforts, it is hard to see the success of substitutes. No matter how cheap and healthy they claimed their products to be, manufacturers of coffee substitutes were unable to convince Swedes to abandon real coffee.