Caffeine: A vitamin-like nutrient, or adaptogen
raypeat.com
raypeat.com
When I read "it helps with this" "it prevents this", I always ask "but at what cost". Can an exogenous molecule that was so adaptive be missed this bad and now consuming it will just fill that gap we had for millions of years?
Let's not kid ourselves. Concentrated caffeine is a drug and not a nutrient. We drink it because it is psychoactive and we habituate to it. Try drinking redbull as a caffeine-naive person or not drinking coffee as a daily drinker. If an exogenous substance is that potent, it is a drug. (Even though I like it myself too, it is also pretty shit of a drug in my opinion, with 5 hr half-life, a dice roll every time whether it is gonna create more sleep than focus and a steep tolerance curve.) Magic mushrooms also have nutritional value, nicotine also has some benefits, beer has tons of calories, they might even have adaptive value with occasional use. You might enjoy them, you might drink coffee everyday. That is fine. But they are all drugs and not nutrients.
Maybe we didn't have a gap for millions of years. The African kola nut contains caffeine and is supposedly a popular stimulant.
Can't say the same about caffeine sources, they weren't consumed for their nutritional content, and the supposed selective advantage of their consumption apparently didn't matter as much as carbs'. We didn't witness a supremacy of caffeine using populations, but we witnessed ones that could utilize carbs.
It may exist in a number of plants all over the world but that doesn't mean that people were harvesting and using it outside of certain isolated cultures until fairly recently, compared to evolutionary timescales.
If anything I'd expect significant genetic variation representing adaptations only present in some groups.
This is highly individual. There are people who can go to sleep after drinking a cup of coffee, who feel sleepy after drinking small amount (how small actually varies) and then people like me that can go on for 5 more hours no matter how tired, even after being awake for more than 24 hr - there is no dice roll, works 100 %.
Generally speaking, you're probably correct, and yet for some individuals some of the time some amount of alcohol, caffeine, psilocybin, mdma, etc etc etc, may have a beneficial effect for some period of time.
https://maps.org/research/mdma
https://hopkinspsychedelic.org
In other words, these medicines are being explored specifically through the lens of public health policy. The question of their benefits being a statistical anomaly (when used in appropriate settings) is looking increasingly unlikely.
Great username btw
Honestly, if I'm truly tired I can go to sleep immediately after drinking a cup. I don't generally intend to do this, obviously, but I've never felt like coffee prevented me from sleeping. It gives me clarity and makes me feel invigorated, but it doesn't feel like the opposite of sleep.
Keep in mind that there's a strong selection bias here. We've been drinking coffee for hundreds of years. If over that time we had ever noticed it had any notable negative side effects, we would have relegated it to the very very long list of substances which are more of a mixed bag.
The engineers of old were very different engineers than today.
During the time frame that the user you replied to was referencing, nicotine consumption was the norm. Now, with the extensive change in societal perspective that nicotine consumption has undergone, those who still use gravitate towards the uneducated and less successful.
I've worked with smokers and non-smokers, both unproductive and productive alike.
I would venture to say that a metric like social media use has a higher correlation with lack of productivity, wouldn't you?
Back then you could smoke at your desk.
Which was unfortunate for the non-smokers.
I still think something else keeps smokers smoking: the taste, the ritual, looking cool, etc.
I assume patches are slow release but smoking provides a bigger hit all at once. Sometimes that's important, both in terms of impact and building tolerance.
(EDIT because I'm not allowed to make a new comment for some reason, this is a reply to the comment below)
Every person is different and you must take care of what you put in your body. I take kratom because it's a double whammy that reduces two problems - depression and migraine - to manageable levels, while having low potential for addiction. I have so far encountered no negative effects from taking it, only positives.
However, I would prefer _not_ to take it. I would prefer _not_ to have depression and migraines and not to need any drugs to maintain a normal lifestyle.
I work on this by maintaining a healthy diet, exercising regularly, sleeping well, meditation, and maybe I'll get there someday. In the meantime, kratom has increased my quality of life a lot over the past few years. This is not intended as a suggestion that anyone else should take it, just an anecdote about my experience.
Regarding constipation - I have heard this before, but never personally experienced it. I mix each dose (<1tps) with a full cup of water, which probably helps.
Also at minimum constipation is a massive symptom
Alcohol does not enhance performance for most professions.
I'm not saying it's good quality code, but it definitely removes the barriers to starting that I often struggle to get over. And starting is the most important step of iterating, I can fix it up tomorrow.
Interestingly, I can replicate that mind-state even without alcoho. The same is true of a couple other states of mind that I originally arrived at though the use of mind altering substances (sadly it does not work for caffeine though).
Yeah absolutely. I often get hung up in architecture astronaut mode about whether this is the right solution, and entering that "who cares? make it work or nothing matters!" mindset is very liberating.
I've been taking some herbal anxiety pills because a friend suggested them.I didn't expect much but it does seem to let me focus on the process and not the what-ifs when I need to.
https://observer.com/2012/04/bottoms-up-the-ballmer-peak-is-...
The main one has to be worse sleep quality.
And no it’s quite likely not the the chicken the the egg problem.
Don’t get me wrong downing 3 double espresso shots 30 min before bed time is probably not a good idea however there is nothing that indicates that caffeine consumption during the day would have an impact on sleep in fact many studies showed that moderate amounts of caffeine even 2 hours before bed did not have a negative impact on sleep and a few studies even showed improvement in REM sleep when caffeine was taken but again nutrition studies are notoriously problematic.
Controlling for all the factors is nearly impossible.
Age, life style, genetics and everything else in between introduces so many variables that you simply can’t estimate or predict their impact on the study.
Even in your specific example it might be caffeine dependency or it might be something else completely like giving up 3-4 americanos a day and not making up for the liquid intake loss which left you more dehydrated in the evening.
The main issue with caffeine, however, is that it is very bitter and so most caffeinated beverages come with a large amount of sugar to mask the taste.
That said, I have grown to love robusta coffee. I've heard it is akin to how cilantro tastes like soap to some people. Delicious for a lot of us.
Some of us live in high pressure high demand work lives. in order to fit that and personal life needs in, we need a push.
While I wouldn't go down the path of "hard drugs", Caffeine is a daily boost when needed.
It’s a super potent drug, no doubt.
I've done informal tests and steady state caffeine every day for a month is not the same as abstaining. You alleles, and hence mileage, may vary.
In fact caffeine is a huge detriment to my ability to be productive, and the last time I quit coffee it took a full month and a half for the grogginess and lethargy to go away. Never again!
> Today, people who are seen as “workaholics” tend to make more money, to be male, and to focus their socializing on scheduled times such as holidays. They also tend rise early to work alone and they often use stimulants (Kemeny 2002[0]; Currey 2013[1]).
[0]: Kemeny, Anna. 2002. “Driven to Excel: A Portrait of Canada’s Workaholics.” Canadian Social Trends 64, March 11.
[1]: Currey, Mason. 2013. Daily Rituals: How Artists Work. Knopf, April 23.
It is nice to drink coffee of course. But I think it comes at a hidden cost. I feel much less stressed out now and I am more efficient at work too.
So perhaps you can try it out for just a month? Drinking no coffee and see how you feel?
I also went down the path for harder drugs, modafinil even speed for a while. But in the end it is not worth it.
Is there a “nutrient” that isn’t harmful in excessive quantities?
Our brains used to compete for scarce calories and nutrition, but now we can vastly increase these things with little to no downside.
There is no scientific distinction between food, drugs, and nutrients. They're all molecules. All that matters is the dosage.
I see you're familiar with Ray's other work :)
This link has various quotes from Ray over the years on this topic.
https://www.functionalps.com/blog/2012/09/28/ray-peat-phd-on...
A few micrograms of LSD and a cheeseburger is not different only for their dosage. One stores solar energy in its molecules in a form we can harvest. Other crosses blood-brain barrier in a way that alters its functioning drastically. Their structural-functional organizations are drastically different, hence the different categories.
Your CPU is also just a bunch of molecules probably as much as your PCs power button, but one packs a very different nature of consequentiality in that small "dosage" of matter than the other.
The way it works is that to some neurons, it looks a lot like serotonin, a neurotransmitter produced by our own body. In technical terms, it is a 5-HT2A agonist. But unlike serotonin, it doesn't want to get out, causing the affected neuron to fire constantly.
Not so different from carbon monoxide, which takes the place of oxygen in red blood cells and doesn't want to let go.
Even if the effects are completely different, they are both caused a molecule that mimic what our body normally uses, but not only it doesn't behave normally, but it is also much more durable. Causing a large effect with a small dose.
And in fact, LSD is derived from ergot fungi, which are toxic and have causes many deaths in the past.
The fact that LSD is of the family ergotamine, and that the fungus ergot which happens to contain ergotamine has caused deaths, is a meaningless statement.
Chemistry and psychopharmacology is an incredibly complex topic, and it isn't as simple as saying "Well, X is related to Y, and X causes A, ergo Y must cause A."
There's a concept called "structure-activity relationship" (SAR) in medicinal chemistry, and it's the study between a molecule's "physical" (for lack of a better word) shape and it's effects.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure%E2%80%93activity_rel...
If you aren't familiar with medicinal chemistry, as a human your assumption is probably to go "Well, X molecule is really close to Y molecule, so they must do similar things."
Unfortunately, this just is not how it works.
Look at amphetamines. Saying something is an "amphetamine" is meaningless, because what an "amphetamine" is and does is entirely dependent on _which_ amphetamine it is.
Regular "amphetamine" is a simple stimulant.
Then you have psychedelic amphetamines, like 2,4,5-Trimethoxyamphetamine, which aren't stimulatory at all and act more like LSD.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trimethoxyamphetamine
Both of them are, by definition, "amphetamines", but no commonality in terms of effects/psychoactivity.
A single structural change makes the difference between being benign or being incredibly toxic, being a stimulant or a psychedelic, etc.
You can't talk about these things with sweeping generalizations.
The only way to have a legitimate, rational discussion about chemicals is to completely rid the physical structure from your head and discuss it in terms of it's receptor affinity, ligand-binding, and Ki values.
Everything else is complete pseudoscience and quackery.
It’s worth being aware of if of college age and likely to drink a lot, do various sports, go clubbing and related stuff.
Or do nutrients always have to transfer solar energy as some post above alludes to? Vitamins functionally support the organism without delivering energy - but they are considered as nutrients too.
Or are we going to include the criticality of its absence? The absence of vitamin C causes scurvy. The absence of caffeine merely means losing luxury benefits "on top of" what we strictly need.
In that way and as the benefits seem to outweigh the negatives, one could definitely argue that caffeine is a nutrient.
Ref: Kuhn, popper.
I think the simplest answer to this is that for most of human evolutionary history, calories were scarce. And caffeine, like all stimulants, boosts metabolic rate both through thermogenesis and increased activity. That's a hard downside to overcome, even with a plethora of other health benefits.
For our hunter-gatherer ancestors, an endogenous chemical that burned an extra 100 calories a day could very likely mean the difference between life or death during a drought. That's not the case today, because calories are essentially free (in fact we're literally dying due to a surfeit of calories).
Coffee can contain both nutrients and contain a drug. They are not exclusive.
The title is misleading in focusing on caffeine. But the article mostly focuses on the benefits of coffee and tea, while occasionally also talking about the drug it contains.
Your analogies don't always work. Nicotine is not consumed as a food. Neither are magic mushrooms consumed on a regular enough basis to be considered for nutritional purposes. Beer however is a better analogy. And both beer and coffee, in moderation, have a lot of studies so far showing a correlation with longer lifespans. So, is that from the nutrients? From the drug within? Or from both? All are possibilities until we pinpoint causation.
Wealthy people can afford to drink beer and coffee regularly, and have the intelligence to keep their habits within moderation.
I wouldn't be so quick to assume that regular beer/coffee habits actually lead to longer lives lived.
Another large scale study [2] on coffee included 400,000 adults.
Suffice it to say that studies of ~1/2 million people cover a wide range of economic statuses. And there have been enough of these large scale studies already to perform meta-analysis [3], again leading to the same conclusion.
We have similar large scale peer reviewed studies over alcohol. So you'll have to do a lot better than a guess about what the actual causation might be.
> and have the intelligence to keep their habits within moderation.
Wait, I thought poorer people can't afford to drink beer and coffee regularly? Which is it?
The idea that moderation comes with intelligence or wealth is a false stereotype that deserves to die. Plenty of wealthy people and plenty of intelligent people have addiction problems. Wealth and intelligence are bad predictors of addiction. A far better predictor is family history.
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/articl...
Family history is strongly correlated with wealth and intelligence, though. [0]
Studies comprising "adults in Britain" consist almost exclusively of mostly relatively well-to-do and highly educated people, compared to the rest of the world. [1]
Britain basically controlled the world during the entirety of the 1800s. They're a lot better off than most still as a result of that extremely long reign.
And? What does that have to do with your original and wrong claim that wealth and / or intelligence lead people to be better at moderation when it comes to addictive substances?
> Studies comprising "adults in Britain" consist almost exclusively of mostly relatively well-to-do
Your claim was about wealthy. You are moving the goal posts from wealthy to "relatively well-to-do" and "compared to the rest of the world".
And that does not explain why Brits who drink coffee live longer than Brits who do not. Or why the very many studies outside the UK show the same results.
Long story short, he's a curious character. I would take his writings with a grain of salt.
I take a small portion of a caffeine tablet under my tongue for exercising and occasionally for study and work. I am more healthy today than I was a year or more ago, a large part in thanks to caffeine getting me off my butt to run when I don't feel like running, and (safely) allowing me to push myself harder and get a better cardiovascular workout.
Is it accurate to call it a vitamin-like nutrient? No, because obviously it's not like vitamin D3 or C where very high levels are beneficial and we don't need caffeine to survive, but it can be taken in moderate doses indefinitely and still positively impact one's health. It depends on how you define "nutrient".
Modafinil. At least for me (and basically everybody I know that tried it) it's much better than caffeine. Much clearer wakefulness, more focus, less physical, more deep concentration, and fewer side effects (if any).
imo it's good for certain things like coding but significantly reduces lateral thinking / creativity
kinda gives you "mental tunnel vision"
No time like the present! Brew up a pot, and get hammerin'! :)
Care to post any links to this research/citations for those claims?
Caffeine works by blocking adenosine receptors, which is part of the mechanism for feeling tired. So the brain compensates by creating more receptors and flooding the brain with adenosine.
If there are no caffeine molecules in the brain to block the receptors, you will crash. Consume more caffeine, and voila: you feel normal again.
Coffee/caffeine doesn't stop me sleeping, it makes me not want to sleep.
The difference is, I can drink a couple of coffee (long black, strong) then go to bed and sleep soundly. But I have to argue with myself all the way to bed... because now I dont feel like I need it :-P
Mostly we just find new ways that it's good for you instead.
If I’d have to bet, I’d say we’ll trend to having purer caffeine drinks, or maybe better understand how it plays out with other chemicals.
Eggs are pretty nutritious and don't have a lot of calories. I eat mine with a small amount of bacon and feel full 'til lunch. It is odd to me that you put it in the same breath as sugary cereals.
>Pipe smoking gradually became generally accepted as a cause of mouth cancers following work done in the 1700s.
ie. the negative effects were obvious for a long time. There's nothing like that with caffeine - if anything is seems to extend lifespan perhaps in humans and definately in Caenorhabditis elegans https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3922918/
glorious feast
Sugar-laden diets combined with both a mineral poor diet (ergo, no dental remineralization) and a constant subclinical dehydration (did you drink your gallon of water today? no? saliva is the vehicle for said remineralization, and is one of the first to be hit during early stages of dehyrdation; water is required to maintain the pH of your mouth) is bad your teeth.
The worst coffee can do is stain already poor enamel. Coffee is hardly acidic, and its a myth that its more destructive.
Now, if you drink your coffee with sugar? Thats bad, learn to drink it black.
https://www.ada.org/en/~/media/ADA/Public%20Programs/Files/J...
Anything on this list that is below a pH of 5 you should strongly avoid. pH is a log scale, so, pH of 5 is 10x worse than 6, 4 is 10x worse than 5 or 100x worse than 6; the hydroxyapatite in tooth enamel starts to dissolve at 5.5, and coffee is only 5.11, well within your mouth's ability to handle.
If he warned you because you suffer from bruxism, not because of tooth decay, for most people, just follow the normal rules for coffee that everyone else should follow: avoid caffeine 6 hours before bed.
I disagree that "pH of 5 is 10x worse than 6, 4 is 10x worse than 5 or 100x worse than 6". pH is logarithmic with respect to hydrogen ion activity but hydrogen ion activity is not linear with respect to enamel erosion in a human mouth [1].
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S199179021...
How does that work? Where do the metals go?
Searching in the rest of the article I find:
>Coffee drinkers, for example, have been found to have lower levels of cadmium in their kidneys than people who don’t use coffee, and coffee is known to inhibit the absorption of iron by the intestine, helping to prevent iron overload.
I'm immediately suspicious of the way this is framed (I know many people who suffer from lack of iron, I guess they should avoid coffee). And what about the heavy metals then?
Seriously - I was drinking far too much coffee during lockdown and have switched 2 days ago to decaf. Too early to tell, but it feels like less triggering of hyperness...
So through the day it goes: full (morning), low caff (mix) (afternoon), decaf (evening).
No need for it to be either/or.
fwiw
For some reason, when I worked from home, I was getting a headache in the afternoon. All the time. Then one day I only got a chance to get my first cup of coffee. On that day, no headache. So upon further testing it turned out that I can only drink one regular cup when working from home. But on weekends or working from the office, this is not an issue. Only working from home.
Over time, decrease the caf and increase the decaf.
Anyhow, as I recall (and I could be wrong), you actually want to start low and end high. Obviously decaf in the evening may still be good though, given you want to be able to sleep without detriment.
I used to drink decaf, but I just missed the taste of an actual Arabica specialty coffee. Because the decaffeination process removes more than just the caffeine, even specialty decaf is not as good.
It's a short listen (by audiobook standards at least) and explores the the 'good', the 'bad' and everything in between of caffeine and coffee, often using himself as a lab rat to test theories that he comes across in his research.
I've used "search page" and I've skimmed through all the titles, but I have crap eyesight. So maybe I'm missing the reference.
But I would love to see good research relating caffeine or coffee consumption to somehow helping with heavy metal issues.
At first approximation, I'd be surprised if agitating heated water in the presence of particular matter that increased its acidity, then running it through a fine woven filter, didn't have some net effect.
As for the exact mechanism and efficacy, that's unfortunately buried under 10,000,000 search results for coffee enema products...
I've done a little googling myself and wasn't thrilled with the results either, which is why I returned to the article to look at its sources to see if I could find a better place to start -- a thread to pull, if you will, to begin to unravel this question. Good sources tend to lead to other good sources, if only by telling you what sorts of phrases to use in your next search.
>I'd be surprised if agitating heated water in the presence of particular matter that increased its acidity, then running it through a fine woven filter, didn't have some net effect.
Like sifting for gold? xD
0: https://www.berkeleywellness.com/healthy-eating/food-safety/...
1) Cite only the positive studies
2) Don't make any claims about effect size (i.e. correlation strength & predictive strength)
You can basically make this point about literally any substance with enough studies on it. Ranging from melatonin to insulin, to idk... probably not mercury? So I guess that's a strike against 1 and 2 being fully generalizable.
Seeds and legumes are meant to be eaten (by the new plant), but often have anti-plant-eater defenses (like cyanide), including in fruit. Eggs and milk do not seem to have such an analogue.
Fat stores are produced to be eaten (by the host itself), alas.
You can enjoy caffeine and that’s fine. Nothing wrong with that. But it is a drug. Your body does not need caffeine to sustain itself, like it does nutrients.
> You can enjoy black pepper and that’s fine. Nothing wrong with that. But it is a drug. Your body does not need black pepper to sustain itself, like it does nutrients.
A definition of "drug" that counts spices as drugs is probably not a useful definition.
I've done it a long time ago... it's really unpleasant to actually consume that much nutmeg, even in gel capsules, but the feeling is pleasant, warm, and hazy. I took it in the middle of the day and started to feel the effects late at night, and then the next morning I woke up sky high. It's a fairly lucid drug with an strong body high, but I don't recommend it!
> Early studies confirmed that coffee diterpenes (especially cafestol), effectively increase human plasma triacylglycerol and low-density lipoprotein (LDL), may be a potential risk of inducing some cardiovascular diseases [7,14]. However, from a more comprehensive perspective, cafestol and kahweol show a remarkable two-faced effect. In addition to the deleterious effects on serum lipid levels and liver enzymes in some cases, extensive studies have demonstrated that cafestol and kahweol exhibit a wide variety of pharmacological activities, including anti-inflammatory, anti-angiogenic and anti-tumorigenic properties.
Also the taste is strong enough to be a decent coffee replacement.
I experience the worst side effects when I've been fasting too long, or drink it late in the day.
I don't suffer from the downsides of coffee so I don't even have anecdotal experience on this but it sounds like it is worth a shot.
Or eat a banana, [2].
[1] https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/nutrition-and-h...
[2] https://www.hindustantimes.com/health-and-fitness/overcaffei...
For a long period of time I only drank coffee during the week and not weekends, sometimes I stopped some summers and when I slept badly I stopped drinking coffee for a while. No problem at all with any of that.
I do like like the small energy burst in the morning when I'm working and I like the ritual when it is winter in Sweden it is dark and cold outside and you are freezing, then drinking a cup of coffee as you start up your computer is nice.
I never found nicotine addictive. It never compelled me to increase my consumption beyond a few cigarettes a day, usually in social settings. I never became a regular purchaser of cartons of cigarettes. It was purely a social activity as most my peers were smokers and participating in the smoke breaks was a huge part of socializing. But it never escalated beyond that, there was simply no draw and stopping cold-turkey was completely uneventful with zero physiological effects.
Coffee however, has such a profoundly stimulating effect on me, it completely derails my life for days after a lone day of consumption. It's a very on-vs-off modal existence, and if I fall into the on mode for more than a couple contiguous days, I begin craving it and actively seeking it out. And when I manage to finally resist those cravings, I end up going through ~three days of hangover-like withdrawal hell which if I'm not up for enduring will just push me back on the wagon to make it stop.
For me, coffee/caffeine is far more sinister and addictive than cigarettes.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30061507/
"Conclusion: Dependence to traditional cigarettes and snus seem to be relatively similar while NR (nicotine replacement) was rated lower and coffee lowest."
"don't drink coffee, coffee! The Turkish potion is not for kids, weakens the nerves, makes you pale and sick. Don't be a muselman (muslim, archaic), who can't do without it"
My almost 90 year old grandmother still talks like this about coffee and many people forget nowadays how bad of a reputation coffee had in the West until it got really popular, and despite not having many obvious bad health effects, and maybe even having positive ones.
And sadly often a lot of it is tied to the image of the "sickly Turk" which is a popular stereotype attached to most things imported from 'oriental' cultures. You may remember debates about the hookah craze a decade ago or so.
If she is 90, maybe this is some sort of propoganda fallout from WW1 induced shortanges?
In my case, I paid more attention to what I was consuming and coffee seemed like a good thing to drop.
the evidence supporting the value of antioxidants is v. weak. indeed some evidence suggests they increase your chances of cancer.
So, your theory is that all the humans over the course of history who consume caffeine do so to mask generally bad health?
Can I guess that you yourself don’t drink caffeine?
The longest I've made it is four months. Currently a couple weeks back drinking coffee, about to quit again. It's ridiculously hard.
I'm sure there have been a huge amount of studies of caffeine, and maybe they're favouring those which make caffeine look good.
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It's not easy availing yourself of VPNs as basic Internet hygiene in current year. :C
if something is not a medicine, in general, it should deserve more scrutiny.