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Comment by sddsdd | Hacker News Reader

Had a lot of them chewed or in tea in Bolivia and it's pretty close to a caffeine buzz, it's very, very mild.

Caffeine affects people differently… it has very intense effects on me- I would never call it “very very mild”

For the vast majority of people caffeine is very mild compared to cocaine. Coca leaves are in the ballpark of caffeine, however you would rate that subjectively. And personally I think I would have found it hard to tell which was which in a blind test.

As a side note coca tea (or chewed leaves) are often recommended for managing altitude, and chewing leaves did seem to help with headaches I was having at > 12k feet, but again it was fairly subtle, and I am not convinced it's not just placebo/a nice distraction.

If I’ve gone a long time without caffeine a single coffee could keep me awake up for two consecutive all nighters. As a regular drinker I still cannot handle more than one cup of coffee per day. It turns out that I have a number of genes that increase the intensity and the duration of effect. I think genes explain most of the differences in experiences with caffeine.

Have you done a whole genome study?

Yes, a 30x WGS, I recommend it to everyone and you only have to do it once.

Do you have an affiliate link?

I do not, I went with Dante Labs, they have regular discounts down to less than $250. It might take a long time though.

interesting. i have about 1-2 cups most days but 5-6 over a few hours is fine and i still get ok (but poorer quality) sleep

Same, the first time I ever had a cup of coffee I missed two nights sleep.

I have only done 23andme not a WGS like you, but I have at least one liver enzyme SNP that dramatically slows down caffeine metabolism. It took me quite a while to realize that the advice of "no caffeine after 5pm" or whatever needed to be something more like - no more than one cup of coffee before dawn.

Yeah, it would be nice if these general life rules / advice could be written down somewhere with the exceptions listed. I would have appreciated getting a personalized handbook that would have given me a heads up that I was different. Given the price of WGS being low enough to be generally available I think this is something humanity could benefit a lot more from.

I'm sure someone has a list somewhere. I've seen a few of these from the colonial era, but I want a modern one.

That concept is so broad and generally useful it can only be broadly represented by something like Timothy Leary's statement of "think for yourself, and question authority."

Of course, knowing for sure specific facts showing that you are different in some way such that general advice doesn't apply is super useful because it saves you the effort of having to solve the problem on your own- you will always find new ones that nobody has already solved.

Wow. I typically drink 6+ cups a day and it doesn't really seem to affect my sleep unless I have it within ~6h of bedtime.

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