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Comment by bondarchuk | Hacker News Reader

>Participants first abstained from coffee for two weeks before being reintroduced to either caffeinated or decaffeinated coffee in a blinded trial.

So it could easily just be cessation of withdrawal symptoms.

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The sentence immediately before the one you quoted notes that there was a group of non-coffee drinkers in the study, and the sentence immediately after states that both groups experienced the positive effects.

Yes, that's how stimulants work. The first hit, after abstinence, is always the best.

Well obviously, the study could be bunk, but decaf essentially contains no stimulant, so this isn't really enough to explain the results.

Decaf is typically not 100% free of caffeine, and coffee contains other minor stimulants as well

Should be close enough, at most a few milligrams IIRC, certainly less than a can of coke. Does coffee actually contain any other stimulant in more than trace amounts?

It does taste very much like coffee (though it's also easy to tell it's not caffeinated) and placebo effect is real.

I have been experimenting with reducing/abstaining from coffee and I am well aware of its effects, and I doubt you can reach very strong conclusions. There are times where I have experienced no headaches during my abstinence week, others where I've felt terribly, this last one during the heatwave I actually felt pretty good staying away from coffee, and I have been enjoying the slower pace of my thought.

Nutritional research is, as always, as rigorous as astrology.

Personally, coffee makes me much more anxious, more impulsive, more able to bruteforce through things I hate, but reduces creativity and contemplation; just like amfetamine BTW.

Sure research rigor and reproducibility are known issues but if we're gonna complain about the study design it may as well actually take into account the study design. Seems like the biggest complaint W.R.T. study design is just the lack of a good control. Seems like it makes the case for something to do with gut health but then fails to definitively stomp out the placebo effect.

Are you replying to the right comment? Or maybe just haven't had your morning coffee yet? ;)

The point I'm making is that a non-coffee drinker won't have "withdrawal symptoms", so OP's suggestion that the beneficial effects they observed were just "cessation of withdrawal symptoms" doesn't make any sense. As in literally nonsense: "a non-coffee drinker's withdrawal symptoms" is nonsensical in the same way the idea of a square circle is.

2 weeks isn't long enough to reduce ∆FosB expression after drug (caffeine) use. Most likely I'd say you're right; the subjects are in withdrawal and getting a dose is relaxing.

Adding caffeine pill and placebo pill groups would be interesting.

Only if they hadn't also tested decaf. There's clearly another factor at play.

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