How about comparing it to Starbucks' regular hot coffee sizes?
- Short - 180 mg
- Tall - 260 mg
- Grande - 330 mg
- Venti - 415 mg
Is drinking a 12oz Tall at Starbucks really dropping your jaw?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-caf...
I doubt Starbucks is deviously out to over-caffeinate its customers (although if they were, they've got my vote!) but rather the difference is attributable to variations in their brewing process.
There's a limit to the amount of caffeine that can possibly come out of a bean, and so I would say that unless there's evidence they're spiking the brew, that Starbucks coffee is roughly the definition of an "average cup of coffee"
A Venti is 590mL and 415mg of caffeine, 700mg/L of coffee. Based on the chart in [1] that would be roughly speaking the midpoint of roast kind at the 150 minute mark making cold brew, 10g/100mL of coffee beans (Figure 1). Or approximately a dark roast, coarse grind hot brew (Figure 3).
Starbucks use Arabica, typically Italian or French espresso based drinks ha e been made with robusta or an Arabica robusta blend.
Starbucks coffee is not higher in caffeine compared to other cafés, it can actually be lower. The only sig ificant difference is portion sizes, like you mentioned.
Here are some people writing about their experience of drinking 100% Robusta: https://old.reddit.com/r/Coffee/comments/6u2ef4/100_robusta_...
Starbucks coffee doesn't really have a higher ratio of caffeine, just more volume than the official measurements.
That being said, I don't know anybody that drink 8oz cups of coffee.
https://www.triplebarcoffee.com/blog/how-many-ounces-are-in-...
A Starbucks dark roast (short size) has 130mg at 8oz - that is 16.25mg/oz.
That means the espresso has 4.6x the caffeine per volume. I’d say those people you’re tired of have something worth listening to.
https://globalassets.starbucks.com/assets/94fbcc2ab1e2435985...
Starbucks drinks typically have 2 shots (such as a grande mocha) which gonna be around the same amount of caffeine as a cup of coffee
I think espresso has more caffeine per ounce than coffee does.
Yes, absolutely. But I rarely consume caffeine so my experience is very different than yours.
The study used caffeine-naive individuals. That is, people without any caffeine experience or tolerance.
If you give two tall Starbucks coffees to a caffeine naive person, it will definitely cause some notable effects.
Frequent coffee drinkers tend to underestimate the impact of their caffeine tolerance. A seasoned coffee drinker consuming two of the strongest coffees on the market day after day is a different story than caffeine-naive individuals skipping straight to excessive doses of caffeine without any tolerance.
It's also not two 12oz coffees, it's one at 8am and another at 5pm. It just kinda seems like everything you write here is trying to cause a reaction and it feels manipulative.
You write all this just to reveal your actual point:
> If you give two tall Starbucks coffees to a caffeine naive person, it will definitely cause some notable effects.
Well, sure. We can all agree on that. And one of the notable effects is increased fat oxidation. Notice how uninteresting this observation is by itself. No need to dress it up as something more.
That said, Red Bull very likely contains several types of flavonoids that also act as MAO-B inhibitors.
Coffee, on the other hand, contains both MAO-A and MAO-B inhibitors mainly from the Harmala alkaloid family. Some of the compounds are neurotoxic.
[edit] Found this [3] which I assume is what you were talking about? Which I assume is the reason studies show it can act as an antidepressant [4]. Fascinating!
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23850513/
[2] https://www.jwatch.org/fw108796/2014/05/06/severe-hypertensi...
[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16139309/
[4] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/313988#possible-ri...
Nespresso capsules have 60g for reference.
I’ve run some experiments on myself, and this lasts for days at a time with one tall in the morning. If I keep at it for several days, I will crash early one evening, but still only sleep for 4 hours. It’s a nightmare for someone who typically sleeps 8 hours a night — I just feel fog-brained all the time. That said, workouts are super easy.
If I had a tall in the morning and evening on a regular basis, ugh... I can’t even imagine. I did this once for extra energy during a sports tournament (we won), but I basically had to drink myself to sleep each night.
Multiple doctors have told me that caffeine sensitivity varies from person to person, but I am on the unusually sensitive side.
I am 6' 240lbs, she is 4'6" and 90lbs. I can almost microdose caffeine depending on what I am doing... Sometimes it is an energy drink, sometimes cold brew undiluted, sometimes drop coffee. Shoot, at Starbucks I tend to be a "green eye" type of man and laugh when they ask if I want space for creamer.
Unless I pound back a massive amount of caffeine within 2-3 hours of bed I have no issues sleeping; then again, I have never had issues sleeping and the few times I do forget and drink caffeinated before bed, it only delays me a few hours or results in me reading a novel into the night.
If I knew i really needed to sleep i could at any time.
> A nonlinear association between coffee consumption and CVD risk was observed in this meta-analysis. Moderate coffee consumption was inversely significantly associated with CVD risk, with the lowest CVD risk at 3 to 5 cups per day, and heavy coffee consumption was not associated with elevated CVD risk.
[1] https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/circulationaha....
[1] https://americanmigrainefoundation.org/resource-library/caff...
Cyclists I know commonly take 400mg before a race to training session, and often top up over the course of the event if it's more than a couple hours. So I don't think the numbers reported are high, unless casual coffee is your basis comparison. But in the context of caffeine for fat loss, where supplements have high amounts, the numbers seem in line with common use.
Redbull doesn't actually have that much caffeine. A typically, 8oz cup of coffee has more caffeine than a redbull.
In fact, most "energy drinks" don't have that much caffeine. They have other ingredients that also provide energy.
The heavy lifting is done by the caffeine.
Red Bull does nothing to most people that a cup of black coffee wouldn’t do. But the placebo effect is a helluva drug.
500mg is a huge amount for a caffeine-naive person, no matter how you look at it. No one goes from drinking zero caffeine to 6 Red Bulls per day without experiencing abnormally high stimulation.
Caffeine is a pretty common ingredient in any pre-workout, and you can get 200mg pills online cheaply.
https://jissn.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12970-020-...
Anyway, at 21 I decided to use Jack3d, back when it was damn near Meth, it had DMAA in it. I didn't know this but being the 250lb 6' guy I was, slinging grills and landscaping stuff all day, I bucked up and took the "max dose" of it the first time.
Shit, I hit the gym, did extreme cardio on an elliptical for over an hour, lifted weights with some random ripped bros, and when my girlfriend came after work I stayed and ran further on the treadmill than her and her friend. Just the readouts from the elliptical and treadmill were almost 2200 calories.
Even afterwards when we went home I couldn't wait for us to shower before laying into her I still was so wired. A year later she was talking about that night...
Yea, I bet like hell someone that hasn't ever messed with stimulants can be turned sideways by them.
The fat burning might be from reaction of organism that is not used to a lot of daily caffeine ingestion. For example, when I don't use caffeine for a long time my heart rate increases when I increase amount of coffee I drink. But then goes back after some time (presumably when my body gets accustomed to it again).
Also, this kind of research must be read with a little bit of scientific background.
It is easy to get an impression author wanted to establish causation, but in reality this research only shows correlation, and correlation does not prove causation.
From the admittedly little I know about biology and sleep science; I thought it was universally accepted that poor sleep harms your metabolism and thus would make fat-burning less likely.
[1] https://www.sleepfoundation.org/physical-health/sleep-and-bl...
It is actually opposite. Most organisms under stress increase their energy consumption.
A good proxy for energy consumption by your body is your heart rate. Heart rate is linked to the amount of blood distributed through your body and amount of blood is amount of oxygen that is needed by your cells for metabolism.
And amount of oxygen used by cells is almost equal to the amount of energy produced (excluding those rare anaerobic regimes).
Heart rate is always lowest at night during sleep.
What you probably meant is that a person who has poor sleep will have a statistical tendency to eat more, for many reasons. One it is more difficult to exercise willpower when you are not rested well. It might also be more difficult to accurately judge whether what you feel is hunger.
To accurately compare energy use by body you would have to externally limit amount of calories ingested to same level and figure out how much CO2 you emit or how much weight you lost.
Otherwise you are measuring your regulating machine -- ie. your brain, hormones, etc. and that is whole other set of problems.
Eating makes us feel better and if you are on poor sleep you might eat just to offset it.
It matters very little if we burn fat faster, though I doubt it; it matters what the outcome is. In this case it does appear that people get fatter.
> More than two dozen epidemiological studies from around the globe looking at sleep deprivation and BMI in humans have shown association between decreased obesity and an increase in sleep duration.
> Data regarding impact of sleep deprivation on weight loss is conflicting in animals and humans. Sleep deprivation in rodent models causes weight loss despite hyperphagia [63–68]. These differences in rodents and humans may be explained by increased brown fat in rodents (rarely present in adult humans), which is metabolically more active and has been shown to increase thermogenesis and total energy expenditure [67]. In conclusion, epidemiological data is suggestive of weight gain with sleep deprivation though a few studies have also noted weight gain with prolonged sleep. Based on data on sleep duration and weight, sleep hygiene counseling could form an important tool in management of obesity.
> More than two dozen epidemiological studies from around the globe looking at sleep deprivation and BMI in humans have shown association between decreased obesity and an increase in sleep duration. These studies however do not establish a causal relationship.
The paper also mentions and agrees with who you were responding to:
> In summary, energy expenditure is reduced during sleep. Sleep deprivation appears to increase energy expenditure.
And finally in the conclusion:
> Paradoxically a similar U-shaped relation is also noted in several studies looking at the relationship between sleep and weight, with both short and long sleep leading to weight gain.
I may have missed it, but it doesn't appear a causal relationship was ever formed between metabolic dysregluation from sleep issues and weight gain. And since both less and more sleep were associated with weight gain, is sleep or the lack thereof just another symptom of stress and depression? Both of which often cause people to eat more.
The first point is that lack of sleep is associated with increased metabolism (increased energy expenditure at rest).
The second point is that the apparent link between weight gain and sleep deprivation could be explained by involontary caloric intake increase.
if you mean poor control of your body's natural drive to eat which is imperative to our survival, then sure
very few people can consistently control this "impulse" -- the best way to control it is to get adequate sleep and regulate your hormones
TLDR: weight gain is not from body using less energy but from your regulating machine being put out of balance.
Body on caffeine will still use more calories, but your brain on poor sleep will make worse choices and you will eat more just to offset unhappiness.
That would tell us whether there is just an additive effect of high-dose caffeine and exercise, or if somehow the caffeine is interactive with exercise (i.e., has a bigger effect in the exercise group than in the rest group).
I used to drink a lot of Red Bull and stopped as a result. But I sometimes think one of the reasons I haven't put on weight despite my lifestyle is because of my caffeine habits.
After about 6 months of this, one day I was sitting at my desk having just finished my afternoon Redbull, and felt my heart skip a beat, literally. Like a little mini-heart attack. Scared the shit out of me, and I quit Redbull cold turkey that day.
At the time I was really into cycling, riding about 100 miles per week (50 on the weekend plus daily bike commute). I was in tip-top shape, with no family history of heart problems, and an otherwise normal, low-sugar, whole food diet.
Never experienced that since, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there are studies that find a link between super-high caffeine energy drinks and heart or other health problems.
I can no longer drink red bull because it gives me really bad heart palpitations. Meanwhile, I can pretty much drink coffee all day without issue.
Perhaps even uncomfortably so: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qRuNxHqwazs
That being said, caffeine is a good pre-workout.
3mg/kg is over 250mg of caffeine for an average weight man. Twice a day makes that 500mg.
An 8.4oz can of Red Bull contains 80mg of caffeine. They were giving these people an amount of caffeine equivalent to 6 cans of Red Bull. Not a perfect comparison because Red Bull contains other ingredients, but that's still a lot of caffeine. For another point of reference, that's 2.5 shots of 5 hour energy (200mg caffeine per bottle).
To top it off, the subjects were caffeine-naive, so they had no caffeine tolerance. They must have been feeling extremely energetic.
No wonder they burned more fat. I'm not sure this is going to translate to your casual coffee drinker or someone with a high caffeine tolerance.