This thread is going to be similar to threads discussing a paper that points out something negative about alcohol consumption. It’s easy to get defensive (sometimes irrationally so) about our drug habits which may have negative long-term effects.
If I’m being objective (as a “chronic” caffeine consumer) it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if daily consumption of more than 100mg of caffeine had long-term negative effects for many people. Even ignoring possible brain changes proposed in this article, the effects on mood, stress, sleep, etc. are apparent in my personal observations.
Now if only I could figure out how to consume coffee in moderation…
> This thread is going to be similar to threads discussing a paper that points out something negative about alcohol consumption
Heh, when you prefaced with this I thought you were going to say that it will be full of people talking about how it was always obvious that it's bad, how they can't fathom why we as a society accept it, how they would never mess with their brain by using such substances... :-)
>Researchers explore how chronic caffeine consumption potentially impacts brain plasticity
Key words: "chronic caffeine consumption" and "potentially".
Main takeaway: Avoid chronic caffeine consumption to retain proper brain functions. So basically common sense, that excessive use of a psychostimulant will be bad for you.
Basically everyone who consumes caffeine is a chronic user. Everyone I know of drinks it daily, and skipping one day is very unpleasant until your brain gets used to lack of it again (a couple miserable days).
>Basically everyone who consumes caffeine is a chronic user. Everyone I know of drinks it daily
There goes HN with the health quackery again. Citation needed other than your opinion on you circle of acquaintances.
Drinking 300mg vs 50mg of caffeine a day are not the same, and lumping everyone under chronic just because you have a strong opinion on the topic is silly.
In this case they define chronic as someone who consumes over 200mg per day but the article and paper itself is very weak as they did not accurately measure subject's caffeine intake, they just went on subject's self reported data("I drank a coffee and a red bull") and built estimations on that which is weak science as there's not a fixed amount of cafeine in a cup of coffee but can vary wildly.
That doesn't prove everyone who drinks coffee is a chronic consumer. Caffeine doses are not binary, as in either you don't drink any coffee at all or are a chronic consumer otherwise.
What about those who consume it in small moderation?
Just because other people abuse it doesn't mean those who do not suffer the exact same negative effects in the same manner.
Of course studies will mostly focus on the cronic consumers as those will generally show the biggest symptoms and will be easier to study and draw conclusions versus the non coffee consumers, but that doesn't mean everyone is chronic consumer.
“Chronic” means “ongoing”, not “severe”. Given the details in the open access paper, I think this needs more study to find the threshold that matters, and also the highest number I found in this study with in browser search for “ mg” was 200 mg so arguing about 300 vs. 50 just seems silly.
>the highest number I found in this study with in browser search for “ mg” was 200 mg so arguing about 300 vs. 50 just seems silly.
200mg is not the highest number but the threshold they seem to define for chronic. There are definitely people who drink way more than 200mg as that's only about 2 cups of coffee. I assume heavy cafeine users go above 300mg.
If they are doing a red bull every day, caffeine might not be their primary health issue. And the glowing red eyes and increased physical strength might compensate for the potential brain plasticity issue.
There's a known widespread gene variant that changes caffeine metabolism pretty drastically, so that 300mg and 50mg can be pretty close to the same, if it is different people.
My personal experience im a daily drinker 2-3 cups, but can easily not drink for couple of days no problem. But i have high blood pressure my uneducated guess is that BP has a lot to do with how you handle non coffee days
I only occasionally drink coffee (or tea) and have found that 1-2 days of consecutive consumption are fine, but any more will trigger the withdrawal you mentioned. YMMV probably.
When I started drinking coffee, I drank it only at work. I started to have regular headaches on Sunday. It took me a while to connect the dots and understand I was regularly triggering two day withdrawal.
It WILL vary a lot. I do two weeks of "zero coffee" every year and never had any withdrawal symptoms, the rest of the year I drink a lot of coffee (4 big cups a day). Only sometimes I drink it to be more alert, typically I need it only to code. No coffee - no programming or any creative work for me. I try to mantain constant amount of caffeine in organism by sipping those 4 cups for whole day.
It could be a withdrawal symptom if their ability to work returns after the withdrawal period ends.
I've known people who are completely unproductive if they're not on Adderall, or on cannabis, I can't think of any reason there aren't people who are entirely useless without caffeine.
Everybody breathes 70% of nitrogen mixture. Nitrogen at elevated pressures has narcoleptic effect. It's common sense that even at atmospheric pressure nitrogen also has some narcoleptic effect. That is in fact true, as breathing helium mixture at atmospheric pressure improves reaction times.
People don't necessarily do what common sense would say if they have to do something else for other reasons.
Caffeine doesn't stimulate you, it just makes you unaware of how tired you are. You are still tired with many of the downsides of being tired like the negative impact on learning. People who drink coffee routinely have to do it to mask how tiring their lives are.
I dunno. I drink coffee because I like to get up in the morning, grind the beans with my hand grinder, boil the water in the kettle, and put everything together in the French press. It's a transition moment that I take for myself from bedtime to day time. I like to have it after lunch to transition from lunch time where I am typically reading a novel back to work where I'm sitting and writing codes. I like to have a coffee at the coffee shop on the weekend because I can go for a walk with my gf and talk about random shit or plan a holiday or something. I'm not convinced my life is especially tiring except for all the drama I seem to create for myself inside my own head. That's a bit tiring. And so far, coffee seems to offer no respite to that self imposed exhaustion.
You can do all that with decaf beans. Besides turning something into quaint ritual doesn't alter purely biological impact in any way. You could describe in very close terms lighting a joint every day after coming back home. Or drinking a beer, but it doesn't make you any less high or drunk.
Caffeine strongly dysregulates nervous system and sleep patterns. Surprising thing for many people is that after stopping caffeine a lot of nervous drama inside your head might simply fade away.
I love my coffee too and would never give it up. But if you know some smokers they will say the exact same thing about their smoking addiction.
“I don’t really smoke for the nicotine; I enjoy rolling the cigarette, the sensation of holding the cigarette, it gives me something to do with my hands, I like to get fresh air, it’s a social activity, etc.” The human mind is extremely good at rationalizing addiction.
Interesting interview with a award winning barista and coffee entrepreneur that says that caffeine ingestion is something that you should be mindful about:
Hey, i wasn't aware of nitrogen's narcotic effects. That led me down to this hilarious madness: "Hydreliox is an exotic breathing gas mixture of hydrogen, helium, and oxygen" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydreliox
Still, comparing breathing air with drinking coffee is one hell of a bad analogy. Ironically you did succeed in showing the ambiguity of common sense by your own lack thereof.
Well sometimes studies show coffee is good for your brain so I’m relieved to find this outcome because I don’t drink coffee and try to avoid caffeine daily.
Good and bad effects are not mutually exclusive. Coffee can, at the same time, be good for you on one metric and bad on another. The same for different time scales; coffee might be good for you on short-to-medium time scales, but bad on very long time scales.
Perhaps brain plasticity has its own downsides. Otherwise, why evolution would make us lose a lot of it once we reach adulthood? If there was no downsides, keeping a plastic brain for the whole life would be very adaptive. A gotcha must hide somewhere here.
Before the Industrial Revolution, people didn't see so much change in their daily lives. Perhaps the risk of learning something maladaptive outweighed the potential benefits back then.
Well, since agriculture fixed people in the same plot of land for their whole lives, sure. But before that there was nomadism. People moved from one area to another frequently. I think a lot of learning was necessary to map and adjust to new territories. So, I'm not so sure potential maladaptative learning explains everything.
>Well sometimes studies show coffee is good for your brain
Why can't it be both good and bad for you? Water is also good for you but you can also die from drinking too much. Same with oxygen. Anything that's good for you in moderation, can kill you when consumed in excess.
The article doesn't say that any amount of coffee is bad for you, it says "chronic caffeine consumption is bad for you" which again, should be common sense. Chronic consumption of anything is generally bad for you.
It may very well be that light to moderate consumption could be beneficial at the same time as chronic being bad.
Chronic just means consistently for a long time, not the amount. There's lots of things for which chronic consumption is not bad (like pretty much everything considered healthy).
I have a hard time with news outlets taking articles, in which the authors highlight the need for further research, and suggest the findings as fact. I know it says “may”, but that’s not how people read it.
The study isn't (directly) studying sleep so that's hardly a surprise. It's perfectly possible that it's actually the disturbed sleep causing the response, and not the caffeine itself (at least from my brief skim of the paper).
Personally I place little to zero value on these "we asked people to estimate something and then found a correlation" studies, there are too many potentially confounding variables to account for. Perhaps the non-caffeine drinkers have different types of occupations, social class, health consciousness etc.
Yes, it’s very likely people with sleep trouble (caused by apnea usually) are more likely to consume greater quantities of caffeine to help fight daytime sleepiness caused by the apnea.
Since I had to click through to see what's meant by "chronic" (ugh), they mean 200mg per day. That works out to a little over three espressos / instant coffees, or nearly seven sodas.
One 8oz cup of Starbucks coffee (the smallest size) or two shots of espresso has roughly 150mg of caffeine, according to their posted metrics. Most customers likely consume multiple times that.
It's better coffee than those places that want to make coffee the "proper way", but can't. I understand the "corporations-bad" source of the hate for Starbucks, but their coffee is okay precisely because they're driven by corporate goals: Press button, coffee comes out, calibrated the same as every other Starbucks in the world; to be passable.
> I understand the "corporations-bad" source of the hate for Starbucks
No, you don't. If you did, you wouldn't talk about it like that.
And their coffee is bad, not [just] in a "this company illegally attacks unions, treats their workers heinously, undercuts small businesses to gain a monopoly, and are currently actively supporting a genocide" kind of way, but in a "these beans are literally burnt" kind of way.
Some people might like burnt beans, in the same way some people like burnt steak, or prefer McDonalds over a real burger. Fine. You're allowed to like bad coffee.
"However, it’s crucial to approach these findings with caution. The research in this field is still in its early stages, and the studies have limitations, including small sample sizes and the complexity of accurately measuring and controlling caffeine consumption."
Here you go, 15 paragraphs in is the information you're looking for:
> found that MEP facilitation, an indicator of increased brain plasticity, is more pronounced in non-caffeine users compared to their caffeine-consuming counterparts
As someone who doesn't take any form of caffeine: Considering how widespread it is, it's probably just another of those trade-off scenarios for your body.
If I’m being objective (as a “chronic” caffeine consumer) it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if daily consumption of more than 100mg of caffeine had long-term negative effects for many people. Even ignoring possible brain changes proposed in this article, the effects on mood, stress, sleep, etc. are apparent in my personal observations.
Now if only I could figure out how to consume coffee in moderation…