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Comment by jasonv | Hacker News Reader

I'd been buying regular and decaffeinated coffee and mixing then for the last few years. One day a few months ago I just bought the decaff and used that and had no difficulties at all. None.

So yes, some/many people will have withdrawal issues, but it might also be that you have no side effects in quitting.

I'm totally happy to have quit caffeine.

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Many people in this thread are making the assumption that coffee produces its effects solely through caffeine. This is not true. Coffee contains large amounts of Harmala alkaloids that act as reversible monoamine oxidase inhibitors. Their half-life in brain fatty tissues is several weeks.

This is a good point. I didn’t want to mention it since I’d only ever seen internet claims, but you prompted me to do a new quick search and it’s true:

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16139309/

Apparently tobacco is so hard to quit not just because of the nicotine, but because of the MAOIs. Maybe coffee is the same. Every time I’ve quit caffeine, I’ve kept up decaf.

It would make sense that coffee would be similar. ”Keeping up decaf” is eerily similar to the results of this study:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00213-010-1810-2

The major finding here is that abstinent smokers preferred smoking denicotinized cigarettes over pushing a button to receive nicotine intravenously; i.e. ”keeping up denic”.

Eerie indeed. Time to rethink my free will.

It’s interesting, that study was 10 years ago. I haven’t heard of non-nicotine compounds becoming a part of the therapy since then. But what also happened in those 10 years was nicotine vaporizers took off, and a lot of people traded smoking for those. Wonder what the study would have found if it had nicotine puffs in addition to de-nic tobacco and sham puffs.

Thanks for pointing this out. Off to learn more about this.

Very interesting, anecdotally coffee always had a different effect compared to tea, this seems to be one important difference. Do you have any pointers for further reading regarding the half-life in the brain?

Here’s a review that might lead you there:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6520841/

Thanks, that is a more general review than what I was able to find. I wasn't able to find anything agreeing with a half-life on the order of weeks, however. Is it possible you're mistaking the half-life of irreversible MAOI's (since it binds to the enzyme irreversibly, the half-life is essentially the lifetime of the enzyme, weeks) with reversible (minutes to hours), which seem to be the ones in coffee?

No; the study I remember looking at was about reversible MAOIs being stored in fatty tissues.

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