Coffee won’t give you extra energy, just borrow a bit that you’ll pay for later
theconversation.com
theconversation.com
I'll drink it regardless, as many as I want. I'll pretend the negatives don't exist which by means of placebo is true in my "lived experience".
Denial is an undervalued life skill. When somebody declares a complicated problem, you simply decide "no it isn't" and then you move on.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/food-features/c...
> The bottom line: A large body of evidence suggests that consumption of caffeinated coffee does not increase the risk of cardiovascular diseases and cancers. In fact, consumption of 3 to 5 standard cups of coffee daily has been consistently associated with a reduced risk of several chronic diseases.
Going to work and being a part of a large organization that works on cool products definitely “energizes” me. I have friends at work that I enjoy seeing daily. I would have a hard time keeping my job without caffeine. I could easily see all the ancillary life benefits of being caffeine addicted being the primary reason why coffee seems to be good for health in all these studies.
Is this a standard coffee dose? Maybe I'm just sensitive to caffeine, but a two-cup day generally ends with me being jittery before a crash.
And no, the "standard" coffee dose is a single "double"/"cafe" cup (ie, 12oz or ~350ml total) of drip or immersion or pour-over (extraction methods vary caffeine extraction, see recent James Hoffman video on an example of how much). Drink this cup somewhere between an hour after waking up and 8 hours before going to bed.
Anything more does not increase the focusing effect of caffeine much, but does greatly increase the side effects in some individuals. Anything more than that can drive up tolerance.
3-5 cups a day (measured in single 6oz/~125ml cups) would be too high of a dose (even if taken along that prescribed timing window, not in one go), and would also be driving up tolerance; however, this approximates the standard western use of it, ie, is "normal/average".
Most people have two standard cups for every one mug.
It would be better phrased as "correlation does not prove causation, but it does imply a relationship"
Yes just because something is correlated does not necessarily mean they the have a direct causal relationship, and more importantly it doesn't indicate which way a possible causal relationship would exist. But it does imply that they have a relationship, either directly or that they are both driven by a third force.
You have to apply some additional logic.
What's more likely?
A) Coffee consumption causes good health.
B) Good health causes coffee consumption.
C) Some other force causes improves health AND increased coffee consumption.
D) This is a spurious correlation.
B seems absurd. Or at least would have limited measurably effect. Yes healthy people are more able to drink coffee but it seems like such an effect would be limited.
C could be the case, but with coffee consumption being a deliberate action, if you believe in free will, a seems more likely.
Yes it could also be a spurious correlation, I guess that's possible too.
In this specific case, at the very least you can conclude that coffee is not acutely harmful. If coffee _was_ acutely harmful you would expect to see an inverse correlation between coffee consumption and general health.
But my question to you, in the event of a positive correlation and not having good causation data in either direction, a reasonable person may start to act on the correlation for qualitative reasons.
For example if an initial study of the past finds cigarette smoking correlated with lung cancer, a reasonable person might qualitatively know that smoke goes into the lungs so a lung cancer cause is reasonable and use that as enough reason to stop smoking. It would be unreasonable,IMO, to say “correlation != causation” and keep smoking.
https://img.ifunny.co/images/a0c9b063bf19079839a427ca1cb4ece...
The middle-class world religion of personal health, safety and comfort can no more be derived from the science of our day than the Culte de la Raison could from that of the 18thC (no matter what public health and other officials may tell you).
People underestimate this. You can rephrase denial as "strong will". It only takes one David Goggins style person to blow the lid off what was considered "impossible".
Ignorance is bliss.
Companies that created a coffee break during the industrial revolution did see significant productivity and quality improvements.
It's quite possible that caffeine blocks adenosine and then your body metabolizes it away via another mechanism for it maxes out. Thus you don't end up paying all of it back. Why? Perhaps our brains may be evolutionarily programmed to use less energy than they could because food was previously much harder to come by.
From an energy conservation POV, overproduction of adenosine makes biological sense.
My gut feel is that the important part here is the break, not the coffee — prior to that point it was common to work without stopping.
Also, the interaction of caffeine with adenosine is not new.
I also read somewhere else, in relation to the tolerance build-up, that as the caffeine intake becomes regular, your body produces more and more adenosine than usual to counter-act it. Thus, if you quit the caffeine intake suddenly after many days or weeks of regular intake, you get a crash of biblical proportions. I don't have a source for this right now, but it's also consistent with my own observations. It's also why articles typically suggest to lower the dose progressively when you're trying to quit.
And another myth might be its "positive" effects on exercise. While there are mixed studies on whether caffeine is a diuretic and/or whether it causes dehydration, from my own observations, the motherfucker does make me want to drink insane amounts more of water. So the fake energy sensation is kind of counter-acted by that. Of course, this is my own biased, non-scientific opinion, but I've experimented with this, doing the same exercise the same day of the week, across multiple weeks, with/out the coffee shot. If I want to maximize exercise output now, I stay clear of it, get a good sleep, stay hydrated.
It is neat to read on how/why it works. That said, the claim that "it is not the creation of energy" feels like a stretch anyway. Do people really think they get energized in some magical creation way from coffee? Worse, the claim is there that the adenosine "doesn't go away," but there is no cite for that rather key claim. (Did I miss it?)
Edit: For why that last claim needs a cite, it would be like saying ADHD meds for those that take them are "borrowing focus from a later time." Which... feels very contra to how that works.
It "doesn't go away" in the sense that the adenosine stays bound to the caffeine until your body metabolizes that caffeine away. At that point, the adenosine is released back and follows it's usual cycle. It's not that it "doesn't ever go away".
Do SSRIs work by just "delaying the depression" to later? Because that reads in very much the same way.
I get that the body is complex. I also get that things are necessarily watered down for people like me. I would still like to see studies that were done against the main claim here.
Which means coffee gives you temporary energy (because activity isn't downregulated), but the body continues to consume energy at a higher-than-desired level, releasing more adenosine trying to stop that. As soon as you stop blocking the receptors, you'll get downregulated fairly hard.
Is it OK to characterize this as "borrow and pay back later"? IDK. It's a good enough metaphor to summarize what's happening.
As for comparing it to ADHD meds - these are completely different systems. A comparison doesn't make any sense.
But if you must see a cite, we've known for a long time that caffeine induces adenosine buildup: https://www.nature.com/articles/38160
Should it have been cited? Maybe. But it's a very well known fact, and not everything needs to be proven from first principles. (Also, Occams razor applies - things that go away need a mechanism to make it go away, while things staying around don't)
This is a pop-science article that's surprisingly well sourced. Nitpicking the exhaustiveness of the sources seems somewhat contraproductive.
The link you gave showing it is increased in plasma levels feels good. I would still question whether or not it only gets consumed in the receptors, versus changing where it is stored in the body. (That is, does your body "burn" the same amount of the stuff regardless of whether it is in the receptors or not?)
That said, these questions are just asking how far we have come in understanding. And, really, my main point was to be fair to the question asked and see if there is evidence of the claim. And... quite frankly, there isn't. There were no studies linked showing that you will be tired later if you have coffee. None. To claim that what is there does that, is to hide behind sophistry of science to push claims that it isn't making.
Anecdotally, I had the flu a week at a bit ago. When I'm ill I take my caffeine intake down to zero (so I'm not compromising my sleep). This time I stuck with it. Over the last 10-ish days I've had half a cup of caffeinated coffee. The rest has been decaf (which I believe typically has some trace amounts of caffeine).
I used to drink at least 2 cups, usually 3 per day, occasionally more. I've had no side effects from going to zero. Maybe I wasn't heavy enough of a coffee drinker? But I did expect to feel it while I detoxed. Guess not.
The version I have links to many papers, including these:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10870...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10870...
https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/ben/ctmc/2011/0000001...
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1600-0773....
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1471-4159...
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/026988119100500...
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29514871/#:%7E:text=The%20ph....
I may misunderstand what you mean by cite. Perhaps it has an academic meaning I'm missing? I'm thinking links may not be sufficient as a citation?
This is false, it does go away. Adenosine is metabolized back into AMP, then ADP, then ATP (the fuel for cells). And this does not only happen during sleep.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adenosine_monophosphate
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3246291/
Not sure what's with all the articles that have citations throughout then conveniently exclude the one that matters.
"Companies that created a coffee break during the industrial revolution did see significant productivity and quality improvements."
Without providing any sources.
My quick rules of thumb:
1. I wait 90 minutes from waking to allow adenosine to clear (as opposed to blocking the receptor sites and letting the adenosine stay until crashing in the afternoon). Got this from Andrew huberman on youtube
2. Not after noon - I am fairly early sleeper so a good 8-10 hours to clear the caffeine. (this is about 2 half lives meaning a 75% reduction)
3. Not more than 1 caffeine dose (coffee, coke, premier protein latte -- choose one) just by personal trial and error.
But at the end of the day you're only borrowing time.
Your point 1) was addressed in the article with a cite as well.
https://www.vox.com/2014/8/28/6074177/coffee-naps-caffeine-s...
I came to the same conclusion as you: in the same way that I don't notice a significant uptick in energy when I drink coffee, maybe I also don't get the withdrawal when I stop. Maybe some people are just weird like that?
Then I did the same thing in my early 40s, and the headaches started on the second day. It was pretty bad actually, and I understood what people meant when they talked about an actual, physical withdrawal period. So, now I think it's just metabolism (or some other characteristic that changes with age), rather than a blanket immunity to the effects.
I love coffee, some days I drink 3 cups, some days I forget to drink any at all.
When people "can't get things done" without their morning coffee, is it general haziness/fogginess or are they experiencing headaches?
So I guess there really must be individual differences.
I use a pre-workout from a very famous supplement brand which includes 175 mg of caffeine and I can definitely tell the difference. I can't tell how much of that is because of the caffeine, because it has more stuff like creatine and L-carnitine among other things, but I cant I feel like I last more doing this and I have more energy.
P.S. Of course it's a sample size of one.
Although my most productive periods have been those days where I start drinking coffee again after a month of no caffeine. Then it tapers out but remains at a higher baseline than no caffeine.
The reference range is simply the range of observed states of whatever characteristic is being measured. Here, I would be interested in a study that maps caffeine doses to changes in various characteristics such as alertness/acuity and latency between periods of falling asleep.
So, the debt you owe the caffeine always eventually needs to be repaid, and the only real way to repay it is to sleep.
Since many people also have trouble falling asleep this seems like a win-win if you can the timing right.
>the caffeine won’t bind forever, and the adenosine that it blocks doesn’t go away. So eventually the caffeine breaks down, lets go of the receptors and all that adenosine that has been waiting and building up latches on and the drowsy feeling comes back – sometimes all at once.
This seems like a net win? The adenosine would have always been there making you feel tired without the caffeine, so you are getting "free" energy, and the only after-effect is that you suddenly become exactly as tired as you would have been either way.
That said, I had heard before (and can't find a source for right now) that building up a tolerance to caffeine also causes an up-regulation in adenosine production (or receptors?), so when you stop drinking coffee you become extra tired. But, this article doesn't mention that and my personal experience has been mixed.
I only came into my caffeine habit in my mid 30s, and the change was pretty dramatic and immediate.
Whether I'm slowly killing myself by not sleeping enough is another question entirely that I only wish I knew the answer to.
My advice is to try sleeping a bit more. You might not realise how actually tired you are.
It's absolutely true that it gives you a short term boost that you need to make up for. It spikes your blood pressure 5-15 points, overworks your heart, and kicks your metabolism and immune system into overdrive. One day is whatever - you just need 9 hours of sleep instead of 8. Two or three days, and you seriously can't function without it the next morning and start losing muscle mass, getting headaches, nose bleeds if you are prone to them, etc. As someone who used to drink them (and still do on occasion), none of this is an exaggeration.
Furthermore, they absolutely ruin your teeth with the acidity.
On-topic - the US army rangers did a study on caffeine specifically (among other substances) and found that it tightens up shot groups and increases response times. It is not, by any means, a placebo.
Oh, and building up tolerance is a real thing too, of course.
Coffee on an empty stomach is not good over repeated long term occasions, as it leads to cortisol spikes. If empty-stomaching coffee, it is a good time to pop some trace metal and mineral pills (iron, manganese, zinc, selenium, chromium, moly, boron, magnesium).
Any problems with thiamine are easily reversed via thiamine supplementation. I try to take B-50 complex two or three times a week, and a thiamine supplement on alternate days, roughly at the same frequency.
Coffee does seem to have net benefits. It's good against brain cloud.
> This is because the caffeine won’t bind forever, and the adenosine that it blocks doesn’t go away. So eventually the caffeine breaks down, lets go of the receptors and all that adenosine that has been waiting and building up latches on and the drowsy feeling comes back – sometimes all at once.
> So, the debt you owe the caffeine always eventually needs to be repaid, and the only real way to repay it is to sleep.
Does drinking water offset the exertion-resultant dehydration that caffeine and other stimulants tend to result in?
Since all energy produced by the body is derived from food and conversation of energy is a thing, of course you'll need to pay for it later ... by eating.
Disclosure: I work at Rasa