I can help but feel lied to when there is only a laundry list of "good"s and no analysis on downsides.
When I read "it helps with this" "it prevents this", I always ask "but at what cost". Can an exogenous molecule that was so adaptive be missed this bad and now consuming it will just fill that gap we had for millions of years?
Let's not kid ourselves. Concentrated caffeine is a drug and not a nutrient. We drink it because it is psychoactive and we habituate to it. Try drinking redbull as a caffeine-naive person or not drinking coffee as a daily drinker. If an exogenous substance is that potent, it is a drug. (Even though I like it myself too, it is also pretty shit of a drug in my opinion, with 5 hr half-life, a dice roll every time whether it is gonna create more sleep than focus and a steep tolerance curve.) Magic mushrooms also have nutritional value, nicotine also has some benefits, beer has tons of calories, they might even have adaptive value with occasional use. You might enjoy them, you might drink coffee everyday. That is fine. But they are all drugs and not nutrients.
> Can an exogenous molecule that was so adaptive be missed this bad and now consuming it will just fill that gap we had for millions of years?
I think the simplest answer to this is that for most of human evolutionary history, calories were scarce. And caffeine, like all stimulants, boosts metabolic rate both through thermogenesis and increased activity. That's a hard downside to overcome, even with a plethora of other health benefits.
For our hunter-gatherer ancestors, an endogenous chemical that burned an extra 100 calories a day could very likely mean the difference between life or death during a drought. That's not the case today, because calories are essentially free (in fact we're literally dying due to a surfeit of calories).
A lot of nutrients (e.g., caffeine, vitamin D3, the fiber in raw carrots) are the closest thing we have to a "free lunch" because the evolutionary pressures that limited access to these nutrients are gone.
Our brains used to compete for scarce calories and nutrition, but now we can vastly increase these things with little to no downside.
There is no scientific distinction between food, drugs, and nutrients. They're all molecules. All that matters is the dosage.
Interestingly a number of these things on this list aren't unfettered good things. E.g reducing iron absorption, or increasing fuel efficiency, e.g if you're vegan, or you're trying to lose weight respectively those aren't good things. So I think that resolves the mystery, it's not a missing nutrient, it's just a chemical that can be used to offset consequences of other patterns of consuming exogenous molecules
I don't consume energy drinks under normal circumstances. I save it for that once every 6-12 months when it's 11 PM and something critical needs to be done by SOB. With it I can get 4 hours of zone quite reliably. Then at 3 AM I crash, hard.
>a dice roll every time whether it is gonna create more sleep than focus
This is highly individual. There are people who can go to sleep after drinking a cup of coffee, who feel sleepy after drinking small amount (how small actually varies) and then people like me that can go on for 5 more hours no matter how tired, even after being awake for more than 24 hr - there is no dice roll, works 100 %.
The main issue with caffeine, however, is that it is very bitter and so most caffeinated beverages come with a large amount of sugar to mask the taste.
> Let's not kid ourselves. Concentrated caffeine is a drug and not a nutrient.
Coffee can contain both nutrients and contain a drug. They are not exclusive.
The title is misleading in focusing on caffeine. But the article mostly focuses on the benefits of coffee and tea, while occasionally also talking about the drug it contains.
Your analogies don't always work. Nicotine is not consumed as a food. Neither are magic mushrooms consumed on a regular enough basis to be considered for nutritional purposes. Beer however is a better analogy. And both beer and coffee, in moderation, have a lot of studies so far showing a correlation with longer lifespans. So, is that from the nutrients? From the drug within? Or from both? All are possibilities until we pinpoint causation.
Concentrated vitamin A can also kill you, and a complete lack of it can bring health issues too. Even too much water can be bad for you, along with too much sugar. Too much of X is not a sufficient argument to say something is bad.
During lockdown I quit coffee cold turkey, I didn't feel anything. No changes in energy level or anything. I don't even feel anything other than the flavor difference between tea and coffee.
Caffeine has the unfortunate side effect of raising my blood pressure about 10 mmHg. While I love coffee I had to give it up. I can't imagine that would be good for me long term.
> I can help but feel lied to when there is only a laundry list of "good"s and no analysis on downsides.
Keep in mind that there's a strong selection bias here. We've been drinking coffee for hundreds of years. If over that time we had ever noticed it had any notable negative side effects, we would have relegated it to the very very long list of substances which are more of a mixed bag.
Ray Peat is an interesting researcher. His ideas tend to be original (as in he does his own research & analysis). Yet, I find a lot of things in his writings that don't gel with my research or the broader research. Namely, he does his own selective reading and comes up with a theory---just like everyone else. E.g. he doesn't recognize hormesis (benefits from fasting or occasional nutrient deprivation). He also espouses a heavy sugar laden diet such as drinking orange juice on a continuous basis and avoiding fiber and starches. He sometimes paints a very black and white picture: XYZ is good, ABC is bad, ignoring the context or the nonlinear dose response relationship.
Long story short, he's a curious character. I would take his writings with a grain of salt.
Caffeine gets a lot of love and hate. Personally, I think it's close to a miracle molecule. What other drug can give such an effective boost to wakefulness, mood, and focus with the only main side effects being possible sleep loss and jitteriness/discomfort? Many focus on physical side effects, but I have never seen any evidence of it negatively affecting mental health, despite being psychoactive. I have not consumed amphetamine, cocaine, or the like, but I have tried many legal "nootropics" and all are <= effective compared caffeine with more side-effects.
I take a small portion of a caffeine tablet under my tongue for exercising and occasionally for study and work. I am more healthy today than I was a year or more ago, a large part in thanks to caffeine getting me off my butt to run when I don't feel like running, and (safely) allowing me to push myself harder and get a better cardiovascular workout.
Is it accurate to call it a vitamin-like nutrient? No, because obviously it's not like vitamin D3 or C where very high levels are beneficial and we don't need caffeine to survive, but it can be taken in moderate doses indefinitely and still positively impact one's health. It depends on how you define "nutrient".
I've been off caffeine for going on 40 days now. Work/health were suffering and I needed to hit the reset button. Some days its rough, but on average the change is worth it now. Last week I was able to deal with an extremely stressful event at work without losing my calm. If I had been hopped up on my usual morning brew under similar circumstances, I probably would have made some serious career-altering mistakes (not necessarily my career).
I have a theory that 50 years from now people will look back on caffeine the same way we look back on everyone smoking in the 50's. There were tons of "smoking is healthy" articles back then too, and it was baked into the culture. Caffeine's negatives are more hidden and second order effects that come from increased cortisol levels, lack of sleep, adrenal fatigue, etc. I've done a bunch of research on this and might write it up in a blog post someday.
The difference being that caffeine is consumed today pretty much the same way for hundreds of years (unlike modern cigarettes) and doesn’t have all the lobby behind it (at least not one as strong as alcohol or cigarettes, if any). The whole “smoking is healthy” phase was marketing (and the studies showing the link to cancer date back to 1920s) - same for eating bacon & eggs in the morning, or tricking people into consuming sugary corn flakes as if it’s a healthy food.
If I’d have to bet, I’d say we’ll trend to having purer caffeine drinks, or maybe better understand how it plays out with other chemicals.
> Caffeine's negatives are more hidden and second order effects that come from increased cortisol levels, lack of sleep, adrenal fatigue, etc. I've done a bunch of research on this and might write it up in a blog post someday.
Care to post any links to this research/citations for those claims?
We have enough examples to look at. Even if caffeine ends up linked to some detrimental effects, its nothing on the scale of smoking/lung cancer. Plenty of people both drink or don't drink coffee and in the aggregate its not affecting outcomes to a noticeable degree.
I'm skeptical it will go that way. If you look at the history of smoking, wikipedia has
>Pipe smoking gradually became generally accepted as a cause of mouth cancers following work done in the 1700s.
ie. the negative effects were obvious for a long time. There's nothing like that with caffeine - if anything is seems to extend lifespan perhaps in humans and definately in Caenorhabditis elegans https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3922918/
Sugar-laden diets combined with both a mineral poor diet (ergo, no dental remineralization) and a constant subclinical dehydration (did you drink your gallon of water today? no? saliva is the vehicle for said remineralization, and is one of the first to be hit during early stages of dehyrdation; water is required to maintain the pH of your mouth) is bad your teeth.
The worst coffee can do is stain already poor enamel. Coffee is hardly acidic, and its a myth that its more destructive.
Now, if you drink your coffee with sugar? Thats bad, learn to drink it black.
Anything on this list that is below a pH of 5 you should strongly avoid. pH is a log scale, so, pH of 5 is 10x worse than 6, 4 is 10x worse than 5 or 100x worse than 6; the hydroxyapatite in tooth enamel starts to dissolve at 5.5, and coffee is only 5.11, well within your mouth's ability to handle.
If he warned you because you suffer from bruxism, not because of tooth decay, for most people, just follow the normal rules for coffee that everyone else should follow: avoid caffeine 6 hours before bed.
You can also wash it away with a glass of water. It's common in cafes to get a glass of water with coffee. After every sip of coffee take a sip of water. This helps wit hydration as well.
>Coffee drinkers have been found to have lower cadmium in tissues; coffee making removes heavy metals from water.
How does that work? Where do the metals go?
Searching in the rest of the article I find:
>Coffee drinkers, for example, have been found to have lower levels of cadmium in their kidneys than people who don’t use coffee, and coffee is known to inhibit the absorption of iron by the intestine, helping to prevent iron overload.
I'm immediately suspicious of the way this is framed (I know many people who suffer from lack of iron, I guess they should avoid coffee). And what about the heavy metals then?
Lets talk about Decaffeinated coffee (asking for a friend...)
(a) what benefits of coffee are not attributable to the caffeine, and
(b) does the decaffeination process introduce any "side effects" in terms of harmful chemicals etc.
Seriously - I was drinking far too much coffee during lockdown and have switched 2 days ago to decaf. Too early to tell, but it feels like less triggering of hyperness...
If you're interested in a brief 'story' of caffeine - its roots and history leading up to its role in society today, check out Michael Pollan's 'Caffeine: How Caffeine Created the Modern World' audiobook.
It's a short listen (by audiobook standards at least) and explores the the 'good', the 'bad' and everything in between of caffeine and coffee, often using himself as a lab rat to test theories that he comes across in his research.
The one thing that interests me in this piece is the bit about cadmium and heavy metals and the references at the bottom don't seem to list a study pertinent to this.
I've used "search page" and I've skimmed through all the titles, but I have crap eyesight. So maybe I'm missing the reference.
But I would love to see good research relating caffeine or coffee consumption to somehow helping with heavy metal issues.
The initial phrasing about heavy metals sounded to me like it was referring to the brewing process (without being specific as to which one).
At first approximation, I'd be surprised if agitating heated water in the presence of particular matter that increased its acidity, then running it through a fine woven filter, didn't have some net effect.
As for the exact mechanism and efficacy, that's unfortunately buried under 10,000,000 search results for coffee enema products...
Coffee is rich in phenols and catechols, molecules with a strong electron reduction potential. Metals are more easily absorbed in the cation (eg Fe+2) state. Food and drink is a primary source of heavy metals for most humans. Reducing agents in the diet would reduce e.g. cadmium and mercury from +2 to the less available metallic state, where it would be excreted.
2) Don't make any claims about effect size (i.e. correlation strength & predictive strength)
You can basically make this point about literally any substance with enough studies on it. Ranging from melatonin to insulin, to idk... probably not mercury? So I guess that's a strike against 1 and 2 being fully generalizable.
The funny thing is caffeine is produced by the plant to try to poison herbivores. It’s a very effective insecticide. So are perhaps most other drugs made by plants.
You can enjoy caffeine and that’s fine. Nothing wrong with that. But it is a drug. Your body does not need caffeine to sustain itself, like it does nutrients.
I love caffeine and coffee! I used to drink two to three cups per day but for the last 6 months I’ve been feeling rather unwell when taking it; I start getting sweaty hands, shakes, heart palpitations, and start feeling sick and anxious shortly afterwards. I would love to be able to keep drinking coffee but the price is now too high! I have been drinking decaf coffee which is okay but I miss the real thing. If anyone knows a way I scan keep my caffeine buzz without the above I’d love to know...
If caffeine is so good for us and not simply the drug that it is why do I feel so lousy for at least 2 weeks after giving it up? There is most definitely a withdrawal effect. Furthermore this article muddies the water between caffeine and coffee. How many of the listed benefits are due to the non-caffeine elements within coffee?
Coffee and caffeine are not mutually exclusive. Coffee is one of the best drinks for antioxidants (without milk). Caffeine in large quantities is bad for the health. Moderate and experiment.
[+] [-] acituan|5 years ago|reply
When I read "it helps with this" "it prevents this", I always ask "but at what cost". Can an exogenous molecule that was so adaptive be missed this bad and now consuming it will just fill that gap we had for millions of years?
Let's not kid ourselves. Concentrated caffeine is a drug and not a nutrient. We drink it because it is psychoactive and we habituate to it. Try drinking redbull as a caffeine-naive person or not drinking coffee as a daily drinker. If an exogenous substance is that potent, it is a drug. (Even though I like it myself too, it is also pretty shit of a drug in my opinion, with 5 hr half-life, a dice roll every time whether it is gonna create more sleep than focus and a steep tolerance curve.) Magic mushrooms also have nutritional value, nicotine also has some benefits, beer has tons of calories, they might even have adaptive value with occasional use. You might enjoy them, you might drink coffee everyday. That is fine. But they are all drugs and not nutrients.
[+] [-] dcolkitt|5 years ago|reply
I think the simplest answer to this is that for most of human evolutionary history, calories were scarce. And caffeine, like all stimulants, boosts metabolic rate both through thermogenesis and increased activity. That's a hard downside to overcome, even with a plethora of other health benefits.
For our hunter-gatherer ancestors, an endogenous chemical that burned an extra 100 calories a day could very likely mean the difference between life or death during a drought. That's not the case today, because calories are essentially free (in fact we're literally dying due to a surfeit of calories).
[+] [-] pdog|5 years ago|reply
Our brains used to compete for scarce calories and nutrition, but now we can vastly increase these things with little to no downside.
There is no scientific distinction between food, drugs, and nutrients. They're all molecules. All that matters is the dosage.
[+] [-] BurningFrog|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ehmish|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrslave|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ip26|5 years ago|reply
Maybe we didn't have a gap for millions of years. The African kola nut contains caffeine and is supposedly a popular stimulant.
[+] [-] frant-hartm|5 years ago|reply
This is highly individual. There are people who can go to sleep after drinking a cup of coffee, who feel sleepy after drinking small amount (how small actually varies) and then people like me that can go on for 5 more hours no matter how tired, even after being awake for more than 24 hr - there is no dice roll, works 100 %.
[+] [-] dehrmann|5 years ago|reply
The main one has to be worse sleep quality.
[+] [-] empath75|5 years ago|reply
The main issue with caffeine, however, is that it is very bitter and so most caffeinated beverages come with a large amount of sugar to mask the taste.
[+] [-] tchaffee|5 years ago|reply
Coffee can contain both nutrients and contain a drug. They are not exclusive.
The title is misleading in focusing on caffeine. But the article mostly focuses on the benefits of coffee and tea, while occasionally also talking about the drug it contains.
Your analogies don't always work. Nicotine is not consumed as a food. Neither are magic mushrooms consumed on a regular enough basis to be considered for nutritional purposes. Beer however is a better analogy. And both beer and coffee, in moderation, have a lot of studies so far showing a correlation with longer lifespans. So, is that from the nutrients? From the drug within? Or from both? All are possibilities until we pinpoint causation.
[+] [-] whiddershins|5 years ago|reply
Is there a “nutrient” that isn’t harmful in excessive quantities?
[+] [-] novok|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] econcon|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elindbe2|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnfn|5 years ago|reply
Keep in mind that there's a strong selection bias here. We've been drinking coffee for hundreds of years. If over that time we had ever noticed it had any notable negative side effects, we would have relegated it to the very very long list of substances which are more of a mixed bag.
[+] [-] techbio|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] starchild_3001|5 years ago|reply
Long story short, he's a curious character. I would take his writings with a grain of salt.
[+] [-] metrokoi|5 years ago|reply
I take a small portion of a caffeine tablet under my tongue for exercising and occasionally for study and work. I am more healthy today than I was a year or more ago, a large part in thanks to caffeine getting me off my butt to run when I don't feel like running, and (safely) allowing me to push myself harder and get a better cardiovascular workout.
Is it accurate to call it a vitamin-like nutrient? No, because obviously it's not like vitamin D3 or C where very high levels are beneficial and we don't need caffeine to survive, but it can be taken in moderate doses indefinitely and still positively impact one's health. It depends on how you define "nutrient".
[+] [-] bob1029|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrischattin|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] herval|5 years ago|reply
If I’d have to bet, I’d say we’ll trend to having purer caffeine drinks, or maybe better understand how it plays out with other chemicals.
[+] [-] justinator|5 years ago|reply
No time like the present! Brew up a pot, and get hammerin'! :)
[+] [-] chaosbutters314|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whycombagator|5 years ago|reply
Care to post any links to this research/citations for those claims?
[+] [-] kgin|5 years ago|reply
Mostly we just find new ways that it's good for you instead.
[+] [-] jayd16|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tim333|5 years ago|reply
>Pipe smoking gradually became generally accepted as a cause of mouth cancers following work done in the 1700s.
ie. the negative effects were obvious for a long time. There's nothing like that with caffeine - if anything is seems to extend lifespan perhaps in humans and definately in Caenorhabditis elegans https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3922918/
[+] [-] sprusemoose|5 years ago|reply
glorious feast
[+] [-] DiabloD3|5 years ago|reply
Sugar-laden diets combined with both a mineral poor diet (ergo, no dental remineralization) and a constant subclinical dehydration (did you drink your gallon of water today? no? saliva is the vehicle for said remineralization, and is one of the first to be hit during early stages of dehyrdation; water is required to maintain the pH of your mouth) is bad your teeth.
The worst coffee can do is stain already poor enamel. Coffee is hardly acidic, and its a myth that its more destructive.
Now, if you drink your coffee with sugar? Thats bad, learn to drink it black.
https://www.ada.org/en/~/media/ADA/Public%20Programs/Files/J...
Anything on this list that is below a pH of 5 you should strongly avoid. pH is a log scale, so, pH of 5 is 10x worse than 6, 4 is 10x worse than 5 or 100x worse than 6; the hydroxyapatite in tooth enamel starts to dissolve at 5.5, and coffee is only 5.11, well within your mouth's ability to handle.
If he warned you because you suffer from bruxism, not because of tooth decay, for most people, just follow the normal rules for coffee that everyone else should follow: avoid caffeine 6 hours before bed.
[+] [-] mmmBacon|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsego|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] user982|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aj-4|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simias|5 years ago|reply
How does that work? Where do the metals go?
Searching in the rest of the article I find:
>Coffee drinkers, for example, have been found to have lower levels of cadmium in their kidneys than people who don’t use coffee, and coffee is known to inhibit the absorption of iron by the intestine, helping to prevent iron overload.
I'm immediately suspicious of the way this is framed (I know many people who suffer from lack of iron, I guess they should avoid coffee). And what about the heavy metals then?
[+] [-] Paddywack|5 years ago|reply
Seriously - I was drinking far too much coffee during lockdown and have switched 2 days ago to decaf. Too early to tell, but it feels like less triggering of hyperness...
[+] [-] ctrlcctrlv|5 years ago|reply
It's a short listen (by audiobook standards at least) and explores the the 'good', the 'bad' and everything in between of caffeine and coffee, often using himself as a lab rat to test theories that he comes across in his research.
[+] [-] DoreenMichele|5 years ago|reply
I've used "search page" and I've skimmed through all the titles, but I have crap eyesight. So maybe I'm missing the reference.
But I would love to see good research relating caffeine or coffee consumption to somehow helping with heavy metal issues.
[+] [-] ethbro|5 years ago|reply
At first approximation, I'd be surprised if agitating heated water in the presence of particular matter that increased its acidity, then running it through a fine woven filter, didn't have some net effect.
As for the exact mechanism and efficacy, that's unfortunately buried under 10,000,000 search results for coffee enema products...
[+] [-] kortex|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] presiozo|5 years ago|reply
1) Cite only the positive studies
2) Don't make any claims about effect size (i.e. correlation strength & predictive strength)
You can basically make this point about literally any substance with enough studies on it. Ranging from melatonin to insulin, to idk... probably not mercury? So I guess that's a strike against 1 and 2 being fully generalizable.
[+] [-] etaioinshrdlu|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexmingoia|5 years ago|reply
You can enjoy caffeine and that’s fine. Nothing wrong with that. But it is a drug. Your body does not need caffeine to sustain itself, like it does nutrients.
[+] [-] baxtr|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andy_ppp|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cutler|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mcculley|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carusooneliner|5 years ago|reply
In my case, I paid more attention to what I was consuming and coffee seemed like a good thing to drop.
[+] [-] mcnamaratw|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joemazerino|5 years ago|reply