Hacker News Reader

Comment by jxy | Hacker News Reader

I can't access the article. Can somebody tell me what is "a cup" mentioned in the article? How much water and how much caffeine is in one "cup" in this article?

All the comments here mentions different number of "cups", but I'm very worried that all are different "cups"

View on HN

Sci-Hub link[1] to the paper.

I think it's safe to conclude that a cup here is in UK terms:

> Individuals aged 37–73 years were recruited in 22 assessment centres across the United Kingdom, between 13 March 2006 and 1 October 2010.

[1] https://sci-hub.se/10.1080/1028415X.2021.1945858

I've looked for this, the BioBank screen is this: https://biobank.ndph.ox.ac.uk/showcase/refer.cgi?id=100319 There is literally no guidance AFAICT. My best estimate is 8 US fl oz as per ChatGPT British still use cups to refer to that sometimes. And caffeine... it varies even from cup to cup, the estimate of 91mg per 8 oz cup is what I use.

Per the article, "Habitual coffee intake was self-reported as cups per day, as part of the touchscreen questionnaire at base line with the question ‘How many cups of coffee do you drink a day?’ "

Sounds like it's based on the colloquial definition, which means... who knows! Self-reported values are very non-specific, since my definition of a 'cup' could mean a 24oz with an added triple shot... or it could mean a weakly brewed cup of instant coffee.

It will average out, so we will need to ask a British person what size an average cup of coffee is.

Not necessarily. If people are differentially biased to report higher cup counts when their actual caffeine strength is lower (because, for instance, they drink 6 cups of instant coffee), then that will have large implications on the study. Controlling for caffeine content is extremely important.

Brit here, an average cup of coffee would be around 1 heaped tsp of instant coffee in a 300ml mug with a bit of breathing room, say 275ml? But that would include the milk, so maybe around 200ml water and 75ml of milk. Would vary quite a lot from person to person though.

That'd be around 57 mg caffeine. On the weak side, compared to espresso or drip coffee. You think the most common preparation is instant coffee? Kind of surprising.

In the UK? Yes. I think in the UK, most people drink most of their coffee at home rather than out at a Starbucks or similar.

Some folks have a percolator or a cafetière or a fully automatic, especially younger people, but if I were to be invited round to meet someone’s parents, I’d expect instant.

To be fair, I haven’t lived in the UK for over ten years now, I can imagine Nespresso type machines may have taken the lead.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com