Caffeine, Stress and Your Health By Elizabeth Scott, PhD is an author, workshop leader, educator, and award-winning blogger on stress management, positive psychology, relationships, and emotional wellbeing. Updated on January 17 Jake Curtis/Iconica/Getty Images People may joke about needing their coffee to function in the morning, but in all seriousness, caffeine is a drug. It's most often consumed in coffee, tea, soft drinks and, in smaller doses, chocolate. While we seem to have a love affair with these foods, there’s been quite a bit of confusion and even controversy surrounding caffeine. Research seems to say conflicting things about the effects of caffeine. It helps to look at the pros and cons. How Caffeine Affects the Brain Effects on the Body You can feel the effects of caffeine in your system within a few minutes of ingesting it, and it stays in your system for many hours—its half-life can range from as little as two hours to as long as 12 hours due to individual differences in metabolism and absorption. 1 Caffeine can affect the body in a variety of ways....... continues..... https://www.verywellmind.com/caffeine-stress-and-your-health-3145078
I drink decaf. I make it quite strong, so that the bitterness replaces the caffeine jolt. It's a compromise, but it works for me. Apart from the decaf, I drink green tea, which has modest amounts of caffeine. I only use 2 teabags for a 1.5-liter pitcher that I drink throughout the day. So I think I have my fiendish caffeine habit fairly under control.
But wait, there's more: New research suggests coffee has unique cognitive benefits beyond caffeine https://www.psypost.org/2023/07/new...que-cognitive-benefits-beyond-caffeine-167305 Scientists testing coffee against plain caffeine found that plain caffeine only partially reproduces the effects of drinking a cup of coffee, activating areas of the brain that make you feel more alert but not the areas of the brain that affect working memory and goal-directed behavior. For many people, the day doesn’t start until their coffee mug is empty. Coffee is often thought to make you feel more alert, so people drink it to wake themselves up and improve their efficiency. Portuguese scientists studied coffee-drinkers to understand whether that wakefulness effect is dependent on the properties of caffeine, or whether it’s about the experience of drinking coffee. “There is a common expectation that coffee increases alertness and psychomotor functioning,” said Prof Nuno Sousa of the University of Minho, corresponding author of the study in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience and Field Chief Editor of the journal. “When you get to understand better the mechanisms underlying a biological phenomenon, you open pathways for exploring the factors that may modulate it and even the potential benefits of that mechanism.” A caffeine kickstart The scientists recruited people who drank a minimum of one cup of coffee per day and asked them to refrain from eating or drinking caffeinated beverages for at least three hours before the study. They interviewed the participants to collect sociodemographic data, and then did two brief functional MRI scans: one before and one 30 minutes after either taking caffeine or drinking a standardized cup of coffee. During the functional MRI scans, the participants were asked to relax and let their minds wander. Because of the known neurochemical effects of drinking coffee, the scientists expected that the functional MRI scans would show that the people who drank coffee had higher integration of networks that are linked to the prefrontal cortex, associated with executive memory, and the default mode network, involved in introspection and self-reflection processes. They found that the connectivity of the default mode network was decreased both after drinking coffee and after taking caffeine, which indicates that consuming either caffeine or coffee made people more prepared to move from resting to working on tasks. Waking up on the right side of the bed However, drinking coffee also increased the connectivity in the higher visual network and the right executive control network – parts of the brain which are involved in working memory, cognitive control, and goal-directed behavior. This didn’t happen when participants only took caffeine. In other words, if you want to feel not just alert but ready to go, caffeine alone won’t do – you need to experience that cup of coffee. “Acute coffee consumption decreased the functional connectivity between brain regions of the default mode network, a network that is associated with self-referential processes when participants are at rest,” said Dr Maria Picó-Pérez of Jaume I University, first author. “The functional connectivity was also decreased between the somatosensory/motor networks and the prefrontal cortex, while the connectivity in regions of the higher visual and the right executive control network was increased after drinking coffee. In simple words, the subjects were more ready for action and alert to external stimuli after having coffee.” “Taking into account that some of the effects that we found were reproduced by caffeine, we could expect other caffeinated drinks to share some of the effects,” added Picó-Pérez. “However, others were specific for coffee drinking, driven by factors such as the particular smell and taste of the drink, or the psychological expectation associated with consuming that drink.” The authors pointed out that it is possible that the experience of drinking coffee without caffeine could cause these benefits: this study could not differentiate the effects of the experience alone from the experience combined with the caffeine. There is also a hypothesis that the benefits coffee-drinkers claim could be due to the relief of withdrawal symptoms, which this study did not test. “The changes in connectivity were studied during a resting-state sequence. Any association with psychological and cognitive processes is interpreted based on the common function ascribed to the regions and networks found, but it was not directly tested,” cautioned Sousa. “Moreover, there could be individual differences in the metabolism of caffeine among participants that would be interesting to explore in the future.”
I know this sounds overly simplistic, but my personal opinion is that coffee/caffeine helps people eat less, hence the health benefits that show up in biomarkers. Same with green tea, matcha, and other beverages.
This is absolutely true. I'm more in the two-hour range, and my wife is definitely in the 12-hour range. If she has any substantial amount of caffeine before noon, her sleep that night is completely wrecked.
One part I left out is that the shittier your diet is, the more important the health effects of coffee become. If having an extra cup prevents you from eating another donut, honey bun, or other packaged food from a convenience store on a daily basis, imagine how important that becomes after 30 years of drinking coffee. That's well over 10,000 pieces of pre-packaged garbage that your system didn't have to process and feel the negative effects of.
More of the same: The Shocking Link Between Office Coffee and Heart Health https://scitechdaily.com/the-shocking-link-between-office-coffee-and-heart-health/ Coffee from workplace machines might be raising your cholesterol more than you think. A new Swedish study reveals that many common office coffee machines fail to filter out cholesterol-elevating compounds found in coffee, sometimes leaving behind even more than espresso or French press. Depending on the machine and brewing method, the amount of harmful diterpenes like cafestol and kahweol can vary widely, and frequent coffee drinkers may be unknowingly boosting their LDL cholesterol levels. Cholesterol-Raising Compounds in Workplace Coffee A new study led by researchers at Uppsala University, in collaboration with Chalmers University of Technology, has found that some workplace coffee machines produce coffee with significantly higher levels of cholesterol-raising compounds. The findings are published in the journal Nutrition, Metabolism & Cardiovascular Diseases. “Considering how much coffee is consumed in Swedish workplaces, we wanted to get a picture of the content of cholesterol-elevating substances in coffee from these types of machines. We studied fourteen coffee machines and could see that the levels of these substances are much higher in coffee from these machines than from regular drip-filter coffee makers,” says David Iggman, researcher at Uppsala University, who led the study. “From this we infer that the filtering process is crucial for the presence of these cholesterol-elevating substances in coffee. Obviously, not all coffee machines manage to filter them out. But the problem varies between different types of coffee machines, and the concentrations also showed large variations over time,” Iggman continued. The bars indicate milligrams of cafestol per cup for the volumes 60 ml (espresso), 137.5 ml (coffee machines) and 150 ml (all others). Two samples were taken from the coffee machines 2-3 weeks apart and the dots in the bars represent average values between the two measurement occasions for each machine. Credit: David Iggman First Study on Office Coffee Machines It’s already well known that boiled coffee contains high levels of the cholesterol-raising diterpenes cafestol and kahweol. A fact acknowledged in the latest Nordic nutrition guidelines, which recommend limiting boiled coffee. In contrast, drip-filter coffee makers that use paper filters are highly effective at removing these substances. How well conventional coffee machines, which are found in public environments such as workplaces, filter out these substances had not been investigated up until now. In the study, the researchers studied fourteen coffee machines in break rooms at different workplaces. The coffee used was five regular brands of ground coffee. They took samples from the coffee made by the machines on a number of separate occasions and analyzed the contents. There was a big difference between the machines in terms of the levels of cafestol and kahweol in the coffee they made, but the levels could also differ at different times. Brewing Machines Showed the Most Risk The most common type of coffee machine, in the study called a brewing machine, is the one that produced coffee with the highest concentrations of diterpenes. In comparative analyses, the researchers investigated peculator coffee, espresso, French press coffee, boiled coffee, and boiled coffee poured through a fabric filter. The boiled coffee contained the highest levels of diterpenes per cup. Some espresso samples also contained high levels, but there was great variation. Filtered Coffee Still the Best Bet “Most of the coffee samples contained levels that could feasibly affect the levels of LDL cholesterol of people who drank the coffee, as well as their future risk of cardiovascular disease. For people who drink a lot of coffee every day, it’s clear that drip-filter coffee, or other well-filtered coffee, is preferable. To determine the precise effects on LDL cholesterol levels, we would need to conduct a controlled study of subjects who would drink the coffee,” says David Iggman. Facts in Brief Two samples were taken from each machine every two to three weeks. The coffee varieties included medium roast and dark roast of five common brands of ground coffee. Most of the machines use ground coffee. One or two grind the beans in the machine, but the researchers don’t think that would have any effect on the levels of diterpenes. We tested 14 machines, including 11 brewing machines and 3 liquid-model machines (lower levels, mixed from a coffee concentrate). For comparison, the same analysis was carried out with some other coffee-making methods such as percolator, French press, boiled coffee, and boiled coffee poured through a fabric filter. In addition, four espresso samples were collected in Gothenburg. All the coffee samples were analysed at Chalmers University of Technology. The samples were collected by medical student Erik Orrje during spring 2024.