This has let me evaluate what caffeine does with fresh eyes, so to say, because I can now consume it occasionally while having many non-caffeinated days to compare to. It's a profoundly psychoactive substance and does a lot of things to cognition. I guess I have decided I don't enjoy how it feels, having previously been dependent on it.
Going caffeine-free made it much easier to lose weight as I have far less cravings for high carbs and sugar now, presumably this is related to the impulsivity impact talked about in the paper.
Going caffeine-free also made me very depressed for a while with severe anhedonia, this lasted way longer (like 3-4 months) than one would generally expect for caffeine withdrawal symptoms.
I had seemingly become so used to the increased dopamine signaling while buzzed on caffeine that my brain was a mess for a rather extended period of time as it got used to not having it.
Overall I view quitting as a positive for me, but I'd warn anyone thinking about doing it to do it carefully and closely monitor their mental health. AFAIK the impacts of quitting can be quite different for different people, so my experience may differ than that of others, but I had no idea how much of a (temporary) mental health crash quitting caffeine could cause until I experienced it.
Also positive in the long-term for me. Fewer digestive issues, less spiky dopamine sensitive or impulsiveness and performance during the day, better memory. I wish it weren't so.
But damn was the 3-6 months of anhedonia awful. I still feel pangs of it.
You might want to look at this pathway, and the enzymes, and the cofactors for these enzymes:
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Pingyuan-Gong/publicati...
Tyrosine 3-monooxygenase (TH) needs Iron
Aromatic-L-amino-acid decarboxylase (DDC) needs B6
That's surprising to me. In my case one of the reasons I discontinued it (emotional effects aside) was mild but consistent weight loss. The stimulant part of the effect seems to suppress my appetite quite effectively although at least part of that is likely indirect due to sustained task focus leading me to skip meals.
Turns out I needed stimulants from time to time, just not that one.
I think caffeine is legitimately more disruptive and addictive than is commonly acknowledged. It creates quite a life-style loop where you need it for [drive, energy, mood, alertness] as a fix to many of the issues it causes, lol. Caffeine is such a widely used drug yet doesn't seem to have been studied that much. It's fascinating to me how the drugs that are socially acceptable seem completely arbitrary. Like alcohol (which in terms of addictiveness isn't far behind the most addictive drugs.)
In tables that compare the most addictive drugs, you know what drug is always missing yet seems to be consumed more widely than any other recreational drug on the planet: caffeine. This is funny though. It may be difficult to actually do high quality, comparative research on caffeine because to do so you would need to find people who don't already consume caffeine and I suspect that is a harder problem than it sounds.
By the way: the set of people who have never been effected by caffeine shrinks even further if you consider whether the mother consumed it during pregnancy.
I couldn't drink coffee or alcohol during those 4 weeks, and notice that I didn't get any migraines after those 4 weeks even when I, for the past 12 years, knew exactly how I got them reliably.
I didn't make sense to me to keep drinking coffee because the benefits of coffee which for me was mostly ritual and taste, didn't outweight the weight of having a migraine for sure if I slept a minute less than 8hrs.
Mind you, I'm talking about a cup almost everyday with milk, ice coffee in the mornings.
After reevaluating your comment and my experience I declare that coffee is not always a cause of mental health incidents, sometimes it might help people.
I recently traveled and didn't have coffee for more than a week. No change I could feel, no craving, nothing. But one of my ex-gf was quite sensitive on many things, had frequent headaches, low blood pressure and coffee was helping with those visibly. So YMMV.
Very interested.
I am a regular coffee drinker, mostly limited to very early morning (e.g. 5-7 am). Also consume celsius here and there when I want to minimize stomach disruption in the morning (e.g. I am about to run).
But have also used THC in the past (no longer, major anxiety inducer for me). Alcohol like so many people. And more recently went on an assisted MDMA/ketamine therapy journey that continues to amaze me in its impact (in all good ways).
Asking as I am reducing caffeine slowly right now and curious what folks are seeing as differences on/off in real terms.
I have better mood, presence of mind and working memory in the morning, especially compared to caffeinated peers. I'm also a lot more aware of when I've woken up from a bad night's sleep (see paragraph 5).
I have much less mid-day dysregulation/impulses compared to caffeinated peers. No predictable afternoon slump either – but a rich lunch will always leave me foggy, lol. If it's the weekend, I'll often join my young kid for the afternoon nap and fall asleep in minutes – the 30-45 min nap usually feels amazing.
Coffee really feels to me now like the psychoactive substance it is. I've had anxiety issues for other reasons in recent years, and today a cup of caffeinated coffee will often trigger a good level of anxiety if I'm not physically active during the peak. The physical symptoms of both are very similar. If I'm moving about, it usually feels good, like something hyped me up, but the sensation comes on its own instead.
Anxiety greatly changes my sleep needs, and caffeine and alcohol both hid these sensations in the past, enough that I suspect I didn't have the interoception (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interoception) to consciously notice and adjust in the past, which would leave me stuck or spiraling in terms of maintenance/recovery, probably for weeks at a time.
In recent days (pretty low anxiety! knock on wood) I have sleep that's almost 2hrs shorter per night, waking up naturally. That came very progressively (sleep quality), then very suddenly (lower needs). Also a great gain, though I also aged a decade and that must contribute as well.
Note that I faded out caffeine by progressively substituting for decaf. No headaches this way (from a peak of ~4 cups a day, I would say?). It sounds like you're doing the same, which I really recommend! There's no need to self-flagellate on top of what's usually a major habit adjustment.
Much less anxious now too, but that's more likely due to ADHD meds.
(But I never had any mental-health incidents, and I drink a lot of it, more than all people that I personally know.)
I also had a very big life altering mental health incident very recently, drank A LOT of coffee during and I feel it helped, now I am much more calm, "more correct" despite drinking coffee like before.
Based on this I posit that coffee is used by humans to offset unwanted mentality changes, not a cause of unwanted mentality changes.
coffee is caffeine plus THOUSANDS of compounds interacting with each other and your body: some of them are protective for the heart for example.
That's why synthetic caffeine is bad, while coffee is overall good in moderation.
That's why more people die from energy drinks than from coffe in coffeeshop hehe
But then I found out I can drink coffee just fine, even 5 cups per day.
Now I'm thinking it was the artificial sweetener.
I jog every day and enjoy vs I don't exercise but I occasionally sprint and I feel awful after.
It likely was a contributor, insofar as the incident had poor sleep as a contributing factor, and I do know with some certainty the caffeine habit had been causing some (likely not all) of my sleep problems. I can also tell you the very worst day of that incident was when I mistakenly consumed caffeine again prior to being recovered enough for that to be safe; that was a horrible glimpse at what that drug can do to you when you're in an already very unstable state. Caffeine definitely can aggravate all kinds of symptoms, even when you're in a relatively stable state. It's a stimulant, after all.
But I think caffeine consumption is… only one factor of many in causes of that incident, and doesn't deserve any special blame. The relevance of the mental health incident here is really that it gave me a chance and a good reason to abruptly stop, and therefore also the opportunity to see what getting the brain back into the caffeination ritual again feels like. (I've tried taking it for a few consecutive days more than once since then, and not particularly enjoyed it. I've also tried it on single isolated days.)
Behaviourally, coffee drinkers exhibited greater impulsivity and emotional reactivity, whereas non-coffee drinkers demonstrated better memory performance.
I don't necessarily deny these benefits but it feels weird for a scientific paper to hedge its bets like this.
> Moderate coffee consumption is associated with various health benefits, including reduced risks of type 2 diabetes, liver disease, cardiovascular diseases, and cancer3. In a large cross-sectional study of 468,629 individuals without clinical cardiovascular disease, light-to-moderate coffee consumption was linked to lower rates of all-cause mortality, cardiovascular mortality, and stroke incidence4. Furthermore, coffee intake is consistently associated with a reduced risk of Parkinson’s disease in a dose-dependent manner, across multiple human cohorts5,6,7. Meta-analyses have also found that coffee consumers face a lower risk of depression8,9, and one meta-analysis of cohort studies examining cognitive decline, showed that coffee consumption accounted for a 27% reduction in the incidence of Alzheimer’s disease
It's like they're starting off with "Now don't get me wrong. Coffee will cure cancer, but..."
> New research reveals mechanisms behind coffee’s positive effects on the gut-brain axis
https://www.coffeeandhealth.org/health/media-content/news-al...
Who said anything about big coffee? These guys might be a secret, anti-coffee organisation. /s
My best explanation is that there are effects, I just suck at self-awareness :)
Then when work picked up, I went back to regular coffee everyday.
I don’t think there’s a hole in my soul though. And caffeine degrades my personality a little bit (to my own judgment).
3-5 is moderate? To me, 3 is already high.
Also, sample size is pretty low and they're all Irish.
Perhaps they even use US coffee cup size, which is 118ml?
Honestly, using an unit of measurement that varies from 118ml to 250ml in a scientific paper brings the whole paper into question.
woa where is half a liter of coffee a "normal" portion?
Personally, I don't feel any kind of "drug like" effects from this routine. I wonder about the strength of coffee people are drinking and the effects of drinking throughout the day rather than just the morning.
Anecdotally, during grad school I drank more per serving and throughout the day, and I certainly felt quite different than my current routine.
Like most things, I think people need to find some moderation/balance.
So the answer to your question is: we can't know, from this study.
I'd say 3 is still moderate and really common. 5 is getting on the high'ish side.
Several of us here drink more than that.
For a traditional Italian espresso, about 7g of coffee beans are extracted. For a third-wave double espresso, it's usually 18g or more.
In my opinion, 10x7g is a lot. 2x12g is more than enough for me.
It’s actually kind of crazy to think that a large portion of a country’s population could be “high” on it basically all of the time. And there is a huge industry in place for delivering said drug to as many people as possible by having it available on almost every street corner.
And that most people take a fairly non-chalant attitude to giving this drug to kids through sweet drinks that are primarily marketed to them as well.
The scale of it is kinda mind boggling to me.
Mind the nonsensical rant, I haven’t had my coffee yet this morning…
The original humans adapted to a wide range of diets across the world (one reason why we're such a successful species), but most groups seem to consume mild psychoactives a lot (it's hard not to, so many wild plants have some level of activity) and seek out more powerful ones occasionally and for specific situations.
My next goal is to cut back to one fully caffeinated drink in the moring and then doing decaf the rest of the day.
The ritualistic habit is the hardest thing to break for me. Also the social aspect of “let’s go for coffee” with friends, family, spouse etc…
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/nasa-spiders-drugs-experime...
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20100033433/downloads/20...
Don't ask me why some blogger posted the PDF in 2013, and also don't ask me how English Wikipedia editors determined that a Wordpress blog is a "Reliable Secondary Source". I did locate the original on NASA's own website. Public Domain (USGov).
But they did test both caffeinated and uncaffeinated coffee, and found the same effects in both, indicating that the effect is caused by something in coffee other than the caffeine
I wonder if you could find similar effects with 4g or broccoli sprouts, or garlic, or ginger, or cumin seed, shiitake mushroom, seaweed, soursop leaf, or...
If anything, it leans slightly toward beneficial or neutral effects.
What broader science says (not just this paper).
Across many large studies, Coffee is associated with:
* ↓ Lowerisk of Type 2 Diabetes
* ↓ risk of Parkinson’s Disease
* ↓ overall mortality (yes, really)
Downsides (for some people):
* Anxiety / jitters
* Poor sleep
* Increased heart rate
Then it turned out my rate of getting migraines dropped off considerably. But I love coffee, so I tried decaf. Migraines returned to being more frequent. So that was that.
If I could get it without the side effects, I surely would. Right now I'm drinking a hot cup of delicious roasted barley tea. But it's not the same.
Then at age 34 I started a new job my first shift work job, late evenings, some overnight jobs. I started off with fancy coffee like french vanilla. A year or so later the first Starbucks opened. I was drinking venti quad shot lattes.
Then energy drinks were permitted for sale here (we had a can ban for years). I recall after drinking a Rockstar 750ml for breakfast and the following muscle spasms made me consider I should tone it down.
So I've settled a bit a small coffee in the evening. Sometimes I don't even finish it.
I don’t like that it’s a pill. I tried making my own theacrine drinks, but theacrine is so bitter that I never found one that I liked. I am still haunted by the chicory + theacrine drink I made…
> Moderate coffee consumption is associated with various health benefits, including reduced risks of type 2 diabetes, liver disease, cardiovascular diseases, and cancer3. In a large cross-sectional study of 468,629 individuals without clinical cardiovascular disease, light-to-moderate coffee consumption was linked to lower rates of all-cause mortality, cardiovascular mortality, and stroke incidence4. Furthermore, coffee intake is consistently associated with a reduced risk of Parkinson’s disease in a dose-dependent manner, across multiple human cohorts5,6,7. Meta-analyses have also found that coffee consumers face a lower risk of depression8,9, and one meta-analysis of cohort studies examining cognitive decline, showed that coffee consumption accounted for a 27% reduction in the incidence of Alzheimer’s disease10.
[1] https://britishlivertrust.org.uk/information-and-support/liv...
— every HN thread about coffee
University of Bristol. "Coffee consumption unrelated to alertness: Stimulating effects may be illusion, study finds." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 3 June 2010. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/06/100602211940.htm>.
https://cleanlabelproject.org/wp-content/uploads/CLP-Decaf-C...
Hasn't happened in a long time, probably due to (1) avoiding cheap decaf and (2) the banning of meth-coffee (heh) in the US.
Could it be the sugar?
> Coffee also affects the gastrointestinal tract. It increases stomach acidity and stimulates the release of hormones that aid digestion. Both caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee promote the contractility of ileal and colonic smooth muscle, helping prevent constipation
As the two times in my adult life I've tried to make an intended break from coffee, it has ended up with almost unbearable stomach pain caused by constipation.
It's good to know that this is not linked to caffeine as I thought, so I will try un-caffinated coffee instead now because I tend to think that my general "tiredness" comes from actual caffeine.
Same ritual each morning without the unknown dosing of a stimulant drug.
(I'm even seeing the number 97% mentioned a lot online.)
I still don't drink coffee, but I started experimenting with paraxanthine and I absolutely love it (paraxanthine is the primary metabolite of caffeine and is also a stimulant). I feel like it gives me most of the benefit of caffeine with very few downsides (no jitters, no crash, exits your system faster).
I drink 3 to 6 Nespresso coffees daily, at various times, including shortly before going to bed. Sometimes I don't drink at all for a few days.
I don't feel any effects related to the number, or whether I drink it or not. Sure, this is subjective but when I compare myself to the stories of the commenters I start to wonder if there is any caffeine at all in what I drink.
I would probably drop coffee it was proven to have negative effects on memory.
This sounds interesting. I've never really considered the constituents of coffee other than caffeine and what unique effects they may bring.
I wonder if I would experience behavioral effects if I replaced my coffee intake with caffeinated non-coffee drinks or pills?
One fun fact: we still haven’t figured out why coffee makes us poop. We’ve studied every chemical in there and can’t seem to find a link, but the association is uh… well-known.
That seems to vary wildly between individuals. It doesn't have that effect on me.
Better to wait at least couple of hours after waking up.
Search this page for "mental health incident"
I've also noticed that I have a sort of natural energy in the morning. I think of it as being similar to how a seed has enough energy in itself to sprout and then get sunlight. It's probably so I can make myself eat and whatnot. I don't really need caffeine to "wake up" as much as I need it to stay awake later in the day, and even if I do have a coffee with breakfast, I'll often get tired before the normal day is over.
Falling asleep after a can of energy drink.
This absolutely happens to my father, who uses coffee as a sleep aid but the science is sketchy.
It is documented but I don't know if it is scientifically valid
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_deficit_hyperactivit...
I can't find it now but I once read that people who report the "paradoxical reaction" to stimulants have a significantly better outcome from stimulant medications, and both those values seem to have higher heritability than ADHD as a whole, possibly even linked to a single gene.
Institute for Scientific Information on Coffee
That's been a big win for me: I feel like I get to enjoy the coffee more, and it eliminated the negative effects for me.
I no longer feel like I suffer when I don't have it. I miss it, the way I miss the sunlight in my office on a cloudy morning, but it's strictly a positive for me when it's around. I only get headaches if I go from 100 to 0, even one day of reduced intake is enough to avoid it for me.
When I'm exhausted and going to bed, I'll go fill the coffee machine, and catch myself thinking "oh boy, it's going to feel so great to wake up at 6am and drink this". Then I shake my head at myself and laugh and how absurd that sounds :D
Coffee is above running hot water in my hierarchy of needs. Seriously. If I were forced to choose between coffee and alcohol for the rest of my life, I'd choose coffee in a heartbeat.
Based on everything I'm reading below, and a "discussion" with Gemini, it's highly probable all of this is related. I know AI isn't a doctor, and confirmation bias and all of that, but even if it's all nonsense - backing off on caffeine or quitting entirely can only help.
So I'm going to star to day, by trying to not have any after 2pm. My regular bedtime is around midnight, so that's 10 hours. We'll see how it goes.
Thanks HN!
So, the coffee stays for now.
You really have to look at the power analysis and the sample size together.
Saying this as a general truth. I am not sure about the power of the method in this papper, i only read the abstract.
If you can predict someone's coffee intake based on testing of their microbiome then you've proven that coffee intake has predictable effects on the microbiome.
The important part isn't predicting coffee use, it's just the proof that there's you can predict and perhaps control in the opposite direction leading to more research.
