I love coffee. Even as a child when I smelled it from the kitchen and my parents were having breakfast already I wanted a sip.
Coffee has been a "side hobby" of mine for years. Different beans, grinders, you name it.
But now that I am older I can see how bad it is for me. My sweat smells different (as if I haven't showered in days), my jitters are increasing, I get very unfocused and aggitated and worst of all, mild panic attacks.
I spent few years thinking that something was really wrong with me until I noticed that coffee has a huge negative effect when I am on crunch time.
I started with teas, still not a fan, and decreasing coffee. Also moving to decaf, where are hard to enjoy because of taste.
I love coffee too, but I don't feel like it has the effect of "pepping me up" anymore. I drink it almost as a snack, now. I have taken my intake way down, though. I used to do 6 - 9 cups a day, depending on the day. Now I'm down to 2, maybe 3.
I was always irritable, now less-so. I am not sure if that's the coffee's doing, though. A lot has changed since my nine cup a day days.
I just quit completely a few days ago, and while the fatigue is overwhelming sometimes, the calm is worthwhile. Unless your job precludes it (long distance driving, piloting etc) it's probably worth a two week trial of no-caffeine.
I also think teas are a terrible substitute. The closest I came was chicory which is .. an acquired taste.
I use coca tea, which is legal where I live (Bogota). It's much gentler and whole-body than coffee, which at least for me is very head-and-cardio focused. It doesn't provide a buzz, it just keeps me from feeling irresistibly sleepy. (I'm still almost always sleepy, at least at this 2800-meter altitude, but it's tolerable.)
How much are you drinking? It doesn't have to be a binary-bad thing - 0-3 cups a day lets me scratch the itch of the hobby, and has never left me with the list of symptoms you've had.
I've had to limit myself to 15g of beans in the morning and 10g after lunch. (And often these days I'll have a cup of black tea at lunch instead.) I'd love to have more, because I enjoy the smell and flavor, but it disrupts my sleep too much.
I'm doing 7+7 grams. That's not much, but I like having about 50/50 coffee and oat milk so end up having almost a mug anyway, though I suppose not everyone would call it coffee any more at that point.
I quit 18 days ago and I already feel better than ever.
"Caffeine doesn't perk you up, it just keeps you from calming down."
I feel like a little child -- the days are longer, my emotions are a lot richer, when I'm nostalgic, I remember most details, not just the "gist". I'm not mentally "spinning my wheels" and running in circles anymore. It's a little harder to bring myself to do stuff that I don't really want to do, because I'm not running around, looking for stuff to do but am intentional about what I want to be doing.
Energy is unsurprisingly much more stable, it comes from exercise and whole food.
My acne and problems with digestion disappeared.
Expect to be essentially dead for all purposes for the first 7 days.
I'd recommend taking L-Tyrosine (or NALT) during withdrawal, optionally with 5-HTP, it's a natural dopamine precursor and makes the anhedonia much shorter.
I'm 20, coming (cold turkey, usually not recommended) from 2 espressos daily.
> "Caffeine doesn't perk you up, it just keeps you from calming down."
I have a slightly different experience.
I stopped having regular coffee (never had much, only a daily capuccino) about 2 years ago (improved sleep, etc).
Every few months now I have a coffee, and when I do it's the best day of my life. I feel invincible, I can keep going for hours without feeling tired (I also have trouble falling asleep later :P). Maybe I'm too sensitive to caffeine, but I'm amazed at how strong the effect is (which is why I try to be careful with it).
I’ve noticed the same effect; if I’ve been off the caffeine for a while and have a coffee – it’s great. But there appears to be a negative counter-effect that compounds when it becomes routine.
For me it’s different. Even a slightly stronger tea makes me anxious and seemingly decreases blood flow to my brain. I don’t know how to explain it but I can feel the veins in my head tightened up. Even a sip of tea wake me right up. I don’t understand how people gulp bunch of french press and espressos like it’s nothing and go about their day.
I started seeing the association between caffeine, jitters and anxiety now that I am in my early thirties. Like you, I enjoyed many years of symptom free caffeine "indulgence". I've switched to enjoying decaf brewed at home with beans that have been decaffeinated using the Swiss Water Method, which removes 99.9% of the caffeine by soaking the green coffee beans in an extract of green coffee + water minus the caffeine - the caffeine diffuses out without the use of solvents! I do agree that most decaf tends to not taste the same at most cafes, because decaf beans tend to sit around longer that regular beans.. sometimes even pre-ground (the horror). I've fell in love in coffee again, and I'm looking into getting a Kafatek Monolith and a linea mini for the home, but if you are getting rid of any espresso equipment at fire sale prices, let me know ;)
Have you tried supplementing L-theanine? A lot of research documents that it’s strong reduction of caffeine related anxiety, while preserving its cognitive and wakefulness benefits.
I love the taste of coffee and liked the buzz when I was younger. I still love the taste but the psychological effects are way too much for me now. I didn't realize how strong the coffee I made on Monday was until it was too late and didn't really recover until today.
I've noticed some of the adverse effects, too. I didn't notice any of it until I read a few stories of people who quit coffee and said they were less irritable, etc.
It's hard because I also love coffee. I, like you, never had to "acquire" a taste for it- I just liked it.
I've done stints where I'd mix half-decaf and half-regular. I should probably do that again.
> My sweat smells different (as if I haven't showered in days), my jitters are increasing, I get very unfocused and aggitated and worst of all, mild panic attacks.
I drink 1-2 cups in the mornings only, and I haven't seen this at all. How much were you drinking?
For what it's worth, dark roasted coffees are much easier on the stomach. I also greatly prefer the taste of a really dark roast. It's harder to source though, most coffees are light or medium for whatever reason.
What? Adding dairy and sugar will offset the effects? Then the effects can't have been very significant to begin with. What if you drank black coffee, but also consumed sugar and dairy separately?
It depends how much and how you're consuming it, but drinking your calories, especially through coffee or soda, is a great way to get fat. Just ask any 32 year old who doesn't exercise and starts every day with shitty coffee mixed with cream and sugar. Drinking cream and sugar will probably offset any positive thing you do for your heart to some extent, unless you're doing something that really demands that kind of calorie consumption.
> be aware that in most studies a cup of coffee is only 8 ounces
Are we sure? The standard USA measure for a cup of coffee is a 6 ounces. (Evidence: search Google on how much grounds you use per cup of coffee.)
Speaking of, how much grounds are used per cup in the research, and what kinds of grounds are used?
This has perplexed me for years, and the looseness in the three factors makes a big difference in how much caffeine or other “coffee stuff” one consumes.
22 US fluid ounces is 650 ml, which is 2.6 standard metric cups of 250 ml. That's a large coffee cup; I hope you're not drinking espresso strength coffee!
No, you’re comparing apples and oranges. It happens that the word cup can mean both an object you’re holding (your example) and a standard measurement for one particular drink (my example), and the two can have different measures.
The definition of “standard” is more expansive than what you’re using. Per Merriam-Webster dictionary, a definition of standard is “something established by authority, custom, or general consent as a model or example”.
A Starbucks 'short' is 8 'ounces'. I'm not sure you can really call 6 'ounces' standard when basic places like Starbucks don't do it that way, can you?
As /u/AuthorizedCust said, I've always understood an Americano to be water + espresso, which is different than what I'd call a normal cup of (American?) coffee.
Do Brazilians drink what I call espresso and call it coffee?
Just wanted to reply here because you're unnecessarily condescending about American coffee. While I'm no fan of drip coffee either the caffeine content is actually higher than in the espressos you mentioned (unless Portuguese and Colombian espresso is somehow wildly different from the Italian one).
I’ve looked into this before. The answer is that, unlike alcohol, there’s no standard unit of coffee.
When researchers say X cups of coffee, they’re entirely relying on their respondents’ personal reporting. So the answer is your best bet is to assume a cup of coffee is about what the average person would call a cup.
Yeah, but none of the academic research on coffee will qualify this to their survey respondents. They just ask how many cups per day, then write it down. Whereas most of the research on alcohol consumption will go in detail about drink size and strength then translate to standard units.
Yes, you are not controlling for the amount of coffee consumed. But that should cancel out in a population based study. The null hypothesis should be that humans drink coffee in a gaussian distributed way (not like with alcohol where the consumption is exponentially distributed). If you then randomly sample from that coffee drinker population (again, gaussian distributed), you can then control for variations in the coffee consumption by comparing the averages of coffee drinkers to non-drinkers.
But, yes, this does center around the hypothesis that coffee consumption is normally distributed. To confirm that I'd assume that there has been some research done on coffee consumption. Research that I have not done, to be clear. But I with no priors, I'd assume a normal distribution, because, well, darn near everything in bio is normally distributed.
If you brew 6 oz of water, some amount will be left in the grounds, adding further ambiguity to the size of a cup. I've seen 5 oz and 4 oz definitions too.
Interesting to see that they relied on random forests for feature selection. I'd wonder if a more "classical" approach would have yielded similar/comparable results, or if these findings where only correlatable due to the use of ML.
For a while I've had this idea of making a website that lets users search for a food item (e.g: coffee, wine, turmeric) and they are presented with a count of how many studies show it has positive or negative effects on the body.
Of course automating the parsing of thousands of papers (and ensuring the verdict is correct) is a huge task. And that's without mentioning the reliability of each study...
They have good health effects on nearly everything.
Unfortunately, their content strategy based on truth does not perform very well. More recently they have been picking fights with the pseudoscience crowd and sensationalizing worthless content which can only be a backwards indicator.
Oh, I have been browsing around and so far I love it. I am waiting for someone to rain on the parade and explain how it's actually a terrible source...
What do you mean by picking fights with the pseudoscience crowd being a backwards indicator? Of all the directions they could go to boost traffic, that seems like a benign one.
I’ve been an Examine.com subscriber for about 1.5 years now. Well worth the money IMO if you’re into some light self-experimentation w.r.t. supplements. I had used it to research supplements that have an effect on blood pressure, and it helped me reduce mine during that period by a huge amount (like 145/90 to 120/70). Now anytime I want to look into a supplement, I pop over. So refreshing vs the usual BS medical blog spam. The linking to study abstracts is the most important part, when combined with human effect matrix.
> I had used it to research supplements that have an effect on blood pressure, and it helped me reduce mine during that period by a huge amount (like 145/90 to 120/70).
That’s a big (and healthy) drop. With high blood pressure being quite common, would you mind sharing what helped (even though I know it may not be the same for everyone and that this is not professional medical advice)?
Sure but ya this isn’t health advice! I did under supervision (in a sense) by my doctor. He originally wanted me to go on proper meds but I asked for a few months to address it on my own and he was astounded by the results.
Big caveat. I also went from doing 1 or 2 bouts of exercise a week to about 4. Exercise makes a huge difference too.
Ok so here’s what worked for me. I took things twice a day (first thing and with dinner).
Omega 3
Olive leaf extract
Green coffee bean extract
Magnesium
Potassium
Garlic
Hibiscus tea (this was a tea not a pill)
Also vitamin D and C (for immune not BP).
The olive leaf / green coffee bean / hibiscus are all well attested (if memory serves) as vasodilators. I think garlic too. The Magnesium and potassium also have an effect.
The Omegas were more for inflammation.
I also tried Apple cider vinegar but had no bad effect when I dropped it. Also started doing turmeric and boron but not related to blood pressure.
I joke with my doctor that to avoid taking that 1 pill I’m now taking like 20 pills. But much prefer this.
While under this regime I also got into much better shape, mostly through diet (cutting out carbs), so for me the supplements were a short term / med term thing while baseline health improved.
Final note. Genetics play a huge role in blood pressure (and have some family history) and of course your stress levels too.
Edit: just remembered, reducing my caffeine intake was also a big part of the story. 2 cups a day is now my max vs 4+ cups.
Incidentally, my dad once met a chemistry Phd on an airplane in Switzerland. They began talking about cholesterol, the guy mentioned that after years of experimentation, he found that olive leaf extract was the best substance he found for mobilizing it. My family has tried it as they do very bad with statins and their side effects, and the results are astounding. It is a very pro metabolic tea
On my other comment, I forgot to note that I phased in the three lifestyle changes. First I started the supplements and that provided most of the drop (down to 130/80 ish). Then I layered on the exercise, reduced caffeine, and change in diet. So most of the drop first came from supplements.
Nutrition science (imo) is doomed if researchers don't take establishment of causal connections seriously. If they declare that they haven't causally connected drinking black coffee with reduction in heart failure, we're left with having to make a random choice between drinking coffee or not drinking coffee, ... i.e. the information is useless to us. What's the purpose of this research then?
> How you brew your coffee also has health consequences. Unlike filter coffee makers, a French press, Turkish coffee or the boiled coffee popular in Scandinavian countries fails to catch a compound called cafestol in the oily part of coffee. Cafestol can increase your bad cholesterol or LDL (low-density lipoproteins).
Most Europeans are drinking espresso, I get the impression it’s not as healthy as filter drip coffee, which is somewhat rare to find.
> filter drip coffee, which is somewhat rare to find
I disagree. Any good coffee spot that doesn't have the usual coffee franchise branding can do V60 or has batch brew. You would be surprised how many smaller cities even in central/eastern Europe have lively coffee culture.
Which city disappointed you?
Oh it’s true I have seen the occasional pour over served when I am ordering a drip coffee. But most of the cafés at least in the Netherlands or Belgium are just using espresso machines. And I very much love good espresso and cappuccino, but after reading this article, I’m thinking I should try something different at home.
I add CoffeeMate fat-free creamer. AFAICT this creamer is tasty in a strong cup of joe. All it appears to do is take up space and make the coffee taste smoother.
71 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 84.4 ms ] threadCoffee has been a "side hobby" of mine for years. Different beans, grinders, you name it.
But now that I am older I can see how bad it is for me. My sweat smells different (as if I haven't showered in days), my jitters are increasing, I get very unfocused and aggitated and worst of all, mild panic attacks.
I spent few years thinking that something was really wrong with me until I noticed that coffee has a huge negative effect when I am on crunch time.
I started with teas, still not a fan, and decreasing coffee. Also moving to decaf, where are hard to enjoy because of taste.
Not sure if anyone is on the same boat.
I was always irritable, now less-so. I am not sure if that's the coffee's doing, though. A lot has changed since my nine cup a day days.
I also think teas are a terrible substitute. The closest I came was chicory which is .. an acquired taste.
(Not GP, just sharing my experience.)
"Caffeine doesn't perk you up, it just keeps you from calming down."
I feel like a little child -- the days are longer, my emotions are a lot richer, when I'm nostalgic, I remember most details, not just the "gist". I'm not mentally "spinning my wheels" and running in circles anymore. It's a little harder to bring myself to do stuff that I don't really want to do, because I'm not running around, looking for stuff to do but am intentional about what I want to be doing.
Energy is unsurprisingly much more stable, it comes from exercise and whole food.
My acne and problems with digestion disappeared.
Expect to be essentially dead for all purposes for the first 7 days.
I'd recommend taking L-Tyrosine (or NALT) during withdrawal, optionally with 5-HTP, it's a natural dopamine precursor and makes the anhedonia much shorter.
I'm 20, coming (cold turkey, usually not recommended) from 2 espressos daily.
I have a slightly different experience. I stopped having regular coffee (never had much, only a daily capuccino) about 2 years ago (improved sleep, etc). Every few months now I have a coffee, and when I do it's the best day of my life. I feel invincible, I can keep going for hours without feeling tired (I also have trouble falling asleep later :P). Maybe I'm too sensitive to caffeine, but I'm amazed at how strong the effect is (which is why I try to be careful with it).
However, my crippling anxiety is mostly gone, so that's a bonus.
Will typically drink 2 cups in the morning and an espresso immediately following lunch.
I’ve noticed a big difference. I rarely get jittery unless I’ve drunk no water in the morning.
Yeah i end up in the bathroom every 20 minutes, but at least this habit stops me from eating all day while working from home.
What's the problem with using CO₂ extraction ?
It's hard because I also love coffee. I, like you, never had to "acquire" a taste for it- I just liked it.
I've done stints where I'd mix half-decaf and half-regular. I should probably do that again.
I drink 1-2 cups in the mornings only, and I haven't seen this at all. How much were you drinking?
I think I'll try and make my heart live longer in ways that don't involve me sitting on the toilets clutching my lower abdomen.
Are we sure? The standard USA measure for a cup of coffee is a 6 ounces. (Evidence: search Google on how much grounds you use per cup of coffee.)
Speaking of, how much grounds are used per cup in the research, and what kinds of grounds are used?
This has perplexed me for years, and the looseness in the three factors makes a big difference in how much caffeine or other “coffee stuff” one consumes.
I don't know if these things are really 'standardised' at all. Who'd have responsibility to do that?
I've had espressos in Colombia and Portugal that probably had more caffeine than in a mug of what Americans drink.
So volume doesn't really say much.
Do we? How do Brazilians prepare a cup of coffee? Is the process different or do you just use a lot more grounds per amount of water?
> Do we?
An 'Americano' is literally watered down coffee.
Yes, I know, espresso is a kind of coffee, but it’s not what Americans are referring to as when they say “coffee”.
Do Brazilians drink what I call espresso and call it coffee?
I didn't mean my observation as some sort of criticism. It is just an observation. Every person should just drink it how they like it.
When researchers say X cups of coffee, they’re entirely relying on their respondents’ personal reporting. So the answer is your best bet is to assume a cup of coffee is about what the average person would call a cup.
Yes, you are not controlling for the amount of coffee consumed. But that should cancel out in a population based study. The null hypothesis should be that humans drink coffee in a gaussian distributed way (not like with alcohol where the consumption is exponentially distributed). If you then randomly sample from that coffee drinker population (again, gaussian distributed), you can then control for variations in the coffee consumption by comparing the averages of coffee drinkers to non-drinkers.
But, yes, this does center around the hypothesis that coffee consumption is normally distributed. To confirm that I'd assume that there has been some research done on coffee consumption. Research that I have not done, to be clear. But I with no priors, I'd assume a normal distribution, because, well, darn near everything in bio is normally distributed.
Of course automating the parsing of thousands of papers (and ensuring the verdict is correct) is a huge task. And that's without mentioning the reliability of each study...
They have good health effects on nearly everything.
Unfortunately, their content strategy based on truth does not perform very well. More recently they have been picking fights with the pseudoscience crowd and sensationalizing worthless content which can only be a backwards indicator.
What do you mean by picking fights with the pseudoscience crowd being a backwards indicator? Of all the directions they could go to boost traffic, that seems like a benign one.
That’s a big (and healthy) drop. With high blood pressure being quite common, would you mind sharing what helped (even though I know it may not be the same for everyone and that this is not professional medical advice)?
Big caveat. I also went from doing 1 or 2 bouts of exercise a week to about 4. Exercise makes a huge difference too.
Ok so here’s what worked for me. I took things twice a day (first thing and with dinner).
Omega 3 Olive leaf extract Green coffee bean extract Magnesium Potassium Garlic Hibiscus tea (this was a tea not a pill) Also vitamin D and C (for immune not BP).
The olive leaf / green coffee bean / hibiscus are all well attested (if memory serves) as vasodilators. I think garlic too. The Magnesium and potassium also have an effect.
The Omegas were more for inflammation.
I also tried Apple cider vinegar but had no bad effect when I dropped it. Also started doing turmeric and boron but not related to blood pressure.
I joke with my doctor that to avoid taking that 1 pill I’m now taking like 20 pills. But much prefer this.
While under this regime I also got into much better shape, mostly through diet (cutting out carbs), so for me the supplements were a short term / med term thing while baseline health improved.
Final note. Genetics play a huge role in blood pressure (and have some family history) and of course your stress levels too.
Edit: just remembered, reducing my caffeine intake was also a big part of the story. 2 cups a day is now my max vs 4+ cups.
I'm making that up.. but if you sponsor a study you want your money's worth!
Nutrition science (imo) is doomed if researchers don't take establishment of causal connections seriously. If they declare that they haven't causally connected drinking black coffee with reduction in heart failure, we're left with having to make a random choice between drinking coffee or not drinking coffee, ... i.e. the information is useless to us. What's the purpose of this research then?
Most Europeans are drinking espresso, I get the impression it’s not as healthy as filter drip coffee, which is somewhat rare to find.
I disagree. Any good coffee spot that doesn't have the usual coffee franchise branding can do V60 or has batch brew. You would be surprised how many smaller cities even in central/eastern Europe have lively coffee culture. Which city disappointed you?
The label says
0 fat
0 trans fat
0 Saturated fat
0 carbohydrates
0 protein
0 cholesterol
0 carbohydrates but
10 calories per spoonful.