Daily coffee may benefit the heart
acc.org
acc.org
I used to drink one cup in the morning every day. However, after a couple years of this, I started experiencing lethargy and mood depression which would both be temporarily alleviated with the morning coffee.
Then my girlfriend at the time surreptitiously replaced my coffee grinds with decaffeinated ones. After a week of headaches and cold-like symptoms, I returned to "baseline normal".
These days I cannot have even small amounts of caffeine without the next day turning into a blur of mental fog and apathy.
Am I just extraordinarily sensitive, or is this a thing?
That being said, it also really depends on your daily coffee consumption. If your coffee dependency is very high and spread throughout the day it will affect your sleep, cause morning fog and lethargic feeling as your body is sleeping, but your brain is not getting a good night's rest and the withdrawal will be a difficult too.
There was a small research done which determined how to maximize the benefit of coffee drinking by drinking it in small amount but changing the time when you drink coffee. Morning coffee is a bad habit as your cortisol levels are high, and you should drink coffee when that level drops. So between 10am - 1pm is a good time to drink your first and only cup of coffee as it stays in your system for 8-10hours, so you should adjust that timing based on the time you go to sleep. And to make the most of it, you should drink as much as you want, 2-3cups in that window.
I was a morning and evening coffee guy, but I now drink between 11am-1pm, the first few days I had severe headaches by 10-11am because of the delayed coffee kick, but later it tapered out. Now I do have a coffee dependency so if I don't drink coffee I do get headaches but since that window has shifted my headaches don't start before late evening which can be managed with a short walk and trying to sleep early. Which I think is healthier than having the day ruined.
I think it was that podcast where it was suggested you should start your day with a dose of morning sunlight (dropping your cortisol levels); have your first coffee around mid-morning and your last sometime around midday. The 8-10 hours you mention is actually the half-life of caffeine for the average person - the point where the level in your system has dropped 50%.
I would also debate whether caffeine/coffee consumption should be classified as an addiction, simply from the fact that it is not necessarily self-destructive and doesn't cause long-term harm or permanent changes to the brain.
Now, I attended college in America where decaf and caffeinated coffee is clearly marked everywhere.
I didn't notice anything particularly different at first.
Eventually, I had this boring mandatory lecture in the afternoon, and to prevent myself from falling asleep, I always took a flask full of caffeinated coffee (about 3 cups) and drank it during the lecture.
A few months later, the class got more interesting, and I decided to stop drinking coffee.
I started having severe headaches every evening, and I didn't even realise the cause. One fine day I randomly drank coffee in the evening, and the headache was gone within 30 minutes! I was addicted to coffee!
I tried slowly reducing the quantity of coffee I drank every evening, but it just wouldn't work. Every evening I would have the headache unless I drank a flask full of coffee.
How did I get rid of the addiction? A few months later I travelled back to Asia. The 28-hour connecting flights combination (one of which was a 16-hour nonstop run), combined with the fact that my Asia timezone was 13 hours ahead US timezone ensured that my body clock got reset and I no longer had the headaches in the evenings. I might have had headaches at night, which I probably slept through.
Fortunately I do not have daily tea or coffee habit. I consume them once in a while purely for taste in restaurants and cafes if they’re known for serving a good brew.
I know people who bring coffee in their lives explicitly. Buying those costly equipments, those branded beans. Feels like cigarette and liquor to me - developing a taste, forcefully.
I myself develop debilitating headaches if I don't have my first coffee by 8:30 or so. I usually require a second around noon.
I have young kids so sometimes you just gotta have that third cup, ya know?
I have a little bialetti stovetop coffee maker. It's not quite espresso but it's thick and strong, just how I like my legal addictive stimulants.
I am slowly reducing the caffeine by switching out the afternoon coffee with two cups, and now one cup of tea. Even that is not easy. When I tried to quit cold turkey, I lasted about a week, and the depression part of the withdrawal symptoms were just too much for me. I felt terrible every day, and it didn't seem to be easing up when I gave up after a week.
Not just you. I get micro seizures accompanied with vision distortions, a killer headache, and often vomit 24-36 hours after last having caffeine. I take this to be a migraine. Even as little as 3 fluid ounces of coca-cola has enough caffeine to do it. Never was a heavy consumer of caffeinated beverages.
I don’t think that everyone has this kind of reaction.
The article also states:
> People often equate coffee with caffeine, but coffee beans actually have over 100 biologically active compounds. These substances can help reduce oxidative stress and inflammation, improve insulin sensitivity, boost metabolism, inhibit the gut’s absorption of fat and block receptors known to be involved with abnormal heart rhythms.
"The most-common methods of decaffeination involve chemical solvents, usually ethyl acetate or methylene chloride. In the direct method, the coffee beans are steamed and then rinsed repeatedly with the chemical solvent to flush away the caffeine."[0]
It is not a given that the coffee doesn't have extra unhealthy chemicals or is stripped away of vital nutrients besides caffeine.
[0]https://www.britannica.com/story/how-is-coffee-decaffeinated
and...?
The problem with a statement like this is that their have been decades of studies with normal coffee while there have been far fewer with decaf.
If you suffer from anxiety, try quitting caffeine. It will suck for several days (in my wife's case a couple of weeks) but if you eliminate or reduce your anxiety, your life will improve more than realize.
Just get green, non smoke-dried version if you can.
My very first anxiety attack was also about an hour after coffee and was definitely a factor.
I try and just get hot chocolates nowadays. :)
have you tried quitting caffeine?
I’ve often wondered this effect as it relates to widely prescribed prescription stimulants (ie adderrall)… is an artificially elevated heart rate damaging or strengthening the system?
I don't have numbers on this, but I have the impression that many people drink coffee on weekdays in order to be awake for their job—and they probably wouldn't make it a daily thing if they didn't have a job—and therefore daily coffee drinkers will contain a much higher proportion of people who are healthy enough to hold down a job.
After about ten days of drinking {an amount} of coffee, your tolerance adjusts, and you're aligned to someone who does not drink coffee at all. You're effectively just maintaining a new baseline, but have developed a regular expenditure / tactile ceremony.
The 'make themselves more productive' claim would need some citations to back that up, as I suspect most is self-reporting anecdata.
Is that really true? I'm speaking from a position of ignorance here, but then that's a very strong statement with non-obvious validity to me. I know that substance tolerance exists (at least it's a very common idea), but is it so generic that it applies to a) all effects and each of those effects in its entirety, and b) to all effective substances that make up coffee?
And as a more specific example, I don't think I've ever taken something like "heroin addicts need to take heroin just to feel normal again, and more to feel a high" so literally that I thought they would function "normally" as in exactly like a non-heroin user would when taking an exact dosage to counteract their tolerance.
Good question.
There was a spectacular long-form article, I'm sure I read via HN, about 7 years ago, that included a delightfully lurid dive into the chemical and biological effects of caffeine, on humans, over a period of a few weeks, and that fond but slightly hazy memory is where I'm getting that figure from.
Regrettably I've not been able to find that particular article again.
I did find this, however:
https://betterhumans.pub/how-to-quit-caffeine-in-one-week-e0...
.. and in the Addictive Potential section they cite this:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27762662/
.. which, if I'm reading that precis right, blows it out to 4 weeks (but it sounds like they were testing the presence of the dependency / tolerance / baseline effect, not trying to determine minimum timeframe to achieve).
The list of Similar Articles at the bottom of that second link suggests there's some body of research out there to back these styles of claims up. The considered wisdom, as far as I can intuit, is to use caffeine strategically rather than frequently, if you want to enjoy the advertised 'energy' and 'focus' benefits. Of course, if you just like the flavour or the ceremony, knock yourself out.
Another example is caffeine is widely used as a pre-workout supplement. In high doses, without tolerance, it actually does demonstrably improve top-level strength. But the way most people use it results in tolerance and doesn't actually help. Nonetheless, the sheer fact that they're working out all the time already results in better heart health, even if the caffeine isn't doing anything on top of that.
I believe coffee drinkers are less likely to commit suicide too, which definitely would align with the purpose a job gives you (fwiw).
I dunno, I guess you could be interested in learning to classify people. If they do X, then that increases your estimate of their current healthiness regardless of the underlying causation. If you're an insurance company, an actuary, etc., then maybe that's all you need to know.
Wet streets do not cause rain (directly).
I believe it’s because caffeine has a vasoconstriction effect, it can reduce blood flow to the retina, the same happens on the brain (lots of small capillaries), that’s why people get headaches on coffee addiction too.
Other way around. It's more bitter - partly from much higher caffeine.
Classic Robusta would be bitter/smokey/earthy whereas as a citrusy/fruity/acidic coffee would be Arabica.
My theory is it was the cafestol and/or kahweol oils since most other coffee brew methods filter the coffee out oils. The French press coffee is very silky compared to drip coffee it's as if you put glycerin in it.
Caffeine never bothered me which is odd since I used to be very sensitive to it. One sip of coffee just one tiny sip used to make my heart race. Now my usual time is (was) to have my coffee at about 7pm or 8pm. I got used to it and it never bothered my sleep.
This article gives a good overview [1]
[1] https://theconversation.com/amp/fact-check-does-coffee-cause...
The thread running through nutritional research is "yep, could be good or bad for you", so why not do what pleases you?
Everything we were told about cholestoral, fat and food pyramid turned out to be nonsense.
I just ignore most of these nutrition "studies" and just stick to moderation and live my life.
And this seems entirely in contrast to, say, alcohol.
and maybe don't have 5 cups a day, shoot for one nice cup, maybe 2 sometimes
> Importantly, consuming any amount of coffee was not associated with a higher risk of heart rhythm problems, including atrial fibrillation (AFib) or atrial flutter, which Kistler said is often what clinicians are concerned about.
I'm also looking at the Wikipedia article on the health effects of coffee, and it seems like 4 cups a day is sort of the sweet spot for a lot of positive effects, but I don't see anything about more than that being bad in most cases.
> A 2012 meta-analysis concluded that people who drank moderate amounts of coffee had a lower rate of heart failure, with the biggest effect found for those who drank more than four cups a day.
Five cup a day drinker over here, so I'd love to know if you have conflicting sources.
Is it that the granules cause health problems?
Though brewed coffee does not contain actual cholesterol, it does have two natural oils that contain chemical compounds -- cafestol and kahweol -- which can raise cholesterol levels.
https://www.webmd.com/cholesterol-management/coffee-choleste...
So yes, filtering probably makes a difference, but not because it's taking out "abundant" cholesterols.
Fun fact: not all cholesterol is bad; it’s only the LDL, while HDL is thought to be good for the heart.
LDL concentration isn’t meaningful at an individual level. LDL particle counts however are. Lots of small LDL particles are way more atherogenic than a few large particles, given a constant density.
https://www.wellandgood.com/unfiltered-coffee-study/ https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20474873209144...
More space / money / profit for non drinking people.
Could you please provide a source for further reading?