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).
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.
A few micrograms of LSD and a cheeseburger is not different only for their dosage. One stores solar energy in its molecules in a form we can harvest. Other crosses blood-brain barrier in a way that alters its functioning drastically. Their structural-functional organizations are drastically different, hence the different categories.
Your CPU is also just a bunch of molecules probably as much as your PCs power button, but one packs a very different nature of consequentiality in that small "dosage" of matter than the other.
The way it works is that to some neurons, it looks a lot like serotonin, a neurotransmitter produced by our own body. In technical terms, it is a 5-HT2A agonist. But unlike serotonin, it doesn't want to get out, causing the affected neuron to fire constantly.
Not so different from carbon monoxide, which takes the place of oxygen in red blood cells and doesn't want to let go.
Even if the effects are completely different, they are both caused a molecule that mimic what our body normally uses, but not only it doesn't behave normally, but it is also much more durable. Causing a large effect with a small dose.
And in fact, LSD is derived from ergot fungi, which are toxic and have causes many deaths in the past.
The fact that LSD is of the family ergotamine, and that the fungus ergot which happens to contain ergotamine has caused deaths, is a meaningless statement.
Chemistry and psychopharmacology is an incredibly complex topic, and it isn't as simple as saying "Well, X is related to Y, and X causes A, ergo Y must cause A."
There's a concept called "structure-activity relationship" (SAR) in medicinal chemistry, and it's the study between a molecule's "physical" (for lack of a better word) shape and it's effects.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure%E2%80%93activity_rel...
If you aren't familiar with medicinal chemistry, as a human your assumption is probably to go "Well, X molecule is really close to Y molecule, so they must do similar things."
Unfortunately, this just is not how it works.
Look at amphetamines. Saying something is an "amphetamine" is meaningless, because what an "amphetamine" is and does is entirely dependent on _which_ amphetamine it is.
Regular "amphetamine" is a simple stimulant.
Then you have psychedelic amphetamines, like 2,4,5-Trimethoxyamphetamine, which aren't stimulatory at all and act more like LSD.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trimethoxyamphetamine
Both of them are, by definition, "amphetamines", but no commonality in terms of effects/psychoactivity.
A single structural change makes the difference between being benign or being incredibly toxic, being a stimulant or a psychedelic, etc.
You can't talk about these things with sweeping generalizations.
The only way to have a legitimate, rational discussion about chemicals is to completely rid the physical structure from your head and discuss it in terms of it's receptor affinity, ligand-binding, and Ki values.
Everything else is complete pseudoscience and quackery.
Or do nutrients always have to transfer solar energy as some post above alludes to? Vitamins functionally support the organism without delivering energy - but they are considered as nutrients too.
Or are we going to include the criticality of its absence? The absence of vitamin C causes scurvy. The absence of caffeine merely means losing luxury benefits "on top of" what we strictly need.
In that way and as the benefits seem to outweigh the negatives, one could definitely argue that caffeine is a nutrient.
It’s worth being aware of if of college age and likely to drink a lot, do various sports, go clubbing and related stuff.
Ref: Kuhn, popper.
I see you're familiar with Ray's other work :)
This link has various quotes from Ray over the years on this topic.
https://www.functionalps.com/blog/2012/09/28/ray-peat-phd-on...
The engineers of old were very different engineers than today.
During the time frame that the user you replied to was referencing, nicotine consumption was the norm. Now, with the extensive change in societal perspective that nicotine consumption has undergone, those who still use gravitate towards the uneducated and less successful.
I've worked with smokers and non-smokers, both unproductive and productive alike.
I would venture to say that a metric like social media use has a higher correlation with lack of productivity, wouldn't you?
Back then you could smoke at your desk.
Which was unfortunate for the non-smokers.
I still think something else keeps smokers smoking: the taste, the ritual, looking cool, etc.
I assume patches are slow release but smoking provides a bigger hit all at once. Sometimes that's important, both in terms of impact and building tolerance.
Alcohol does not enhance performance for most professions.
I'm not saying it's good quality code, but it definitely removes the barriers to starting that I often struggle to get over. And starting is the most important step of iterating, I can fix it up tomorrow.
Interestingly, I can replicate that mind-state even without alcoho. The same is true of a couple other states of mind that I originally arrived at though the use of mind altering substances (sadly it does not work for caffeine though).
Yeah absolutely. I often get hung up in architecture astronaut mode about whether this is the right solution, and entering that "who cares? make it work or nothing matters!" mindset is very liberating.
I've been taking some herbal anxiety pills because a friend suggested them.I didn't expect much but it does seem to let me focus on the process and not the what-ifs when I need to.
https://observer.com/2012/04/bottoms-up-the-ballmer-peak-is-...
(EDIT because I'm not allowed to make a new comment for some reason, this is a reply to the comment below)
Every person is different and you must take care of what you put in your body. I take kratom because it's a double whammy that reduces two problems - depression and migraine - to manageable levels, while having low potential for addiction. I have so far encountered no negative effects from taking it, only positives.
However, I would prefer _not_ to take it. I would prefer _not_ to have depression and migraines and not to need any drugs to maintain a normal lifestyle.
I work on this by maintaining a healthy diet, exercising regularly, sleeping well, meditation, and maybe I'll get there someday. In the meantime, kratom has increased my quality of life a lot over the past few years. This is not intended as a suggestion that anyone else should take it, just an anecdote about my experience.
Regarding constipation - I have heard this before, but never personally experienced it. I mix each dose (<1tps) with a full cup of water, which probably helps.
Also at minimum constipation is a massive symptom
Some of us live in high pressure high demand work lives. in order to fit that and personal life needs in, we need a push.
While I wouldn't go down the path of "hard drugs", Caffeine is a daily boost when needed.
I've done informal tests and steady state caffeine every day for a month is not the same as abstaining. You alleles, and hence mileage, may vary.
In fact caffeine is a huge detriment to my ability to be productive, and the last time I quit coffee it took a full month and a half for the grogginess and lethargy to go away. Never again!
It’s a super potent drug, no doubt.
> Today, people who are seen as “workaholics” tend to make more money, to be male, and to focus their socializing on scheduled times such as holidays. They also tend rise early to work alone and they often use stimulants (Kemeny 2002[0]; Currey 2013[1]).
[0]: Kemeny, Anna. 2002. “Driven to Excel: A Portrait of Canada’s Workaholics.” Canadian Social Trends 64, March 11.
[1]: Currey, Mason. 2013. Daily Rituals: How Artists Work. Knopf, April 23.
It is nice to drink coffee of course. But I think it comes at a hidden cost. I feel much less stressed out now and I am more efficient at work too.
So perhaps you can try it out for just a month? Drinking no coffee and see how you feel?
I also went down the path for harder drugs, modafinil even speed for a while. But in the end it is not worth it.
Maybe we didn't have a gap for millions of years. The African kola nut contains caffeine and is supposedly a popular stimulant.
It may exist in a number of plants all over the world but that doesn't mean that people were harvesting and using it outside of certain isolated cultures until fairly recently, compared to evolutionary timescales.
If anything I'd expect significant genetic variation representing adaptations only present in some groups.
Can't say the same about caffeine sources, they weren't consumed for their nutritional content, and the supposed selective advantage of their consumption apparently didn't matter as much as carbs'. We didn't witness a supremacy of caffeine using populations, but we witnessed ones that could utilize carbs.
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 %.
Generally speaking, you're probably correct, and yet for some individuals some of the time some amount of alcohol, caffeine, psilocybin, mdma, etc etc etc, may have a beneficial effect for some period of time.
https://maps.org/research/mdma
https://hopkinspsychedelic.org
In other words, these medicines are being explored specifically through the lens of public health policy. The question of their benefits being a statistical anomaly (when used in appropriate settings) is looking increasingly unlikely.
Great username btw
Honestly, if I'm truly tired I can go to sleep immediately after drinking a cup. I don't generally intend to do this, obviously, but I've never felt like coffee prevented me from sleeping. It gives me clarity and makes me feel invigorated, but it doesn't feel like the opposite of sleep.
The main one has to be worse sleep quality.
And no it’s quite likely not the the chicken the the egg problem.
Don’t get me wrong downing 3 double espresso shots 30 min before bed time is probably not a good idea however there is nothing that indicates that caffeine consumption during the day would have an impact on sleep in fact many studies showed that moderate amounts of caffeine even 2 hours before bed did not have a negative impact on sleep and a few studies even showed improvement in REM sleep when caffeine was taken but again nutrition studies are notoriously problematic.
Controlling for all the factors is nearly impossible.
Age, life style, genetics and everything else in between introduces so many variables that you simply can’t estimate or predict their impact on the study.
Even in your specific example it might be caffeine dependency or it might be something else completely like giving up 3-4 americanos a day and not making up for the liquid intake loss which left you more dehydrated in the evening.
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.
That said, I have grown to love robusta coffee. I've heard it is akin to how cilantro tastes like soap to some people. Delicious for a lot of us.
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.
Wealthy people can afford to drink beer and coffee regularly, and have the intelligence to keep their habits within moderation.
I wouldn't be so quick to assume that regular beer/coffee habits actually lead to longer lives lived.
Another large scale study [2] on coffee included 400,000 adults.
Suffice it to say that studies of ~1/2 million people cover a wide range of economic statuses. And there have been enough of these large scale studies already to perform meta-analysis [3], again leading to the same conclusion.
We have similar large scale peer reviewed studies over alcohol. So you'll have to do a lot better than a guess about what the actual causation might be.
> and have the intelligence to keep their habits within moderation.
Wait, I thought poorer people can't afford to drink beer and coffee regularly? Which is it?
The idea that moderation comes with intelligence or wealth is a false stereotype that deserves to die. Plenty of wealthy people and plenty of intelligent people have addiction problems. Wealth and intelligence are bad predictors of addiction. A far better predictor is family history.
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/articl...
Family history is strongly correlated with wealth and intelligence, though. [0]
Studies comprising "adults in Britain" consist almost exclusively of mostly relatively well-to-do and highly educated people, compared to the rest of the world. [1]
Britain basically controlled the world during the entirety of the 1800s. They're a lot better off than most still as a result of that extremely long reign.
And? What does that have to do with your original and wrong claim that wealth and / or intelligence lead people to be better at moderation when it comes to addictive substances?
> Studies comprising "adults in Britain" consist almost exclusively of mostly relatively well-to-do
Your claim was about wealthy. You are moving the goal posts from wealthy to "relatively well-to-do" and "compared to the rest of the world".
And that does not explain why Brits who drink coffee live longer than Brits who do not. Or why the very many studies outside the UK show the same results.
Is there a “nutrient” that isn’t harmful in excessive quantities?
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.
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.