Drinking 3-4 Cups of Coffee Is “More Likely to Benefit Health Than to Harm It”

Haha for me it's the opposite. Caffeine cures my migraine the same way rizatriptan does. They are both vasoconstrictors and help reduce my throbbing migraine.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and state a theory I've been considering for a while that could explain these coffee health benefit results...

The liquids I and everyone else consumes can be placed in two classes: pure water and everything else.

When I'm not drinking pure water, my drink of choice is usually coffee, of which I drink about 3 cups a day.

Now let's think of the alternative non water drinks out there... Many of them are sodas which have obscenely high sugar levels, just like most drinks that aren't pure water.

Someone who doesn't drink coffee may have more of these sugar containing drinks when they're not drinking pure water, inundating their bodies with harmful amounts of sugar.

So the benefits we see from high levels of coffee consumption come not from the coffee itself but from a substitution effect of replacing unhealthy sugary drinks with coffee.

A good test for this would be to see if tea drinkers also experience health benefits similar to those seen in the study. If not then that may indicate that my theory is wrong.

Just like milk, there is probably a sub population of people whose body chemistry is not compatible with caffeine or coffee. You may fall into that category.

So the article touched on this briefly but I think it's a point worth exploring: a big problem with many sources of caffeine is also that sugar confuses the issue. Many people have an excessive amount of sugar with their coffee (personally I find coffee revolting and 4+ sugars is the only way I could cope if I were forced to drink it).

Other caffeinated drinks (eg sodas) are either sweetened (sugar or HFCS or have artificial sweeteners.

So about a month ago I decided I was drinking too much caffeine. I'm talking 600-700mg a day. I should also point out that my variance with and without caffeine is pretty low. In college for example I tried once to take caffeine pills to stay awake to cram. Not sure how much I took but it was enough that my hands were shaking. I still fell asleep just fine. Some people really do seem a whole lot more sensitive to this than I am.

Anyway, my reason wasn't coffee in particular but sugar. For years I've drunk artificial sweetener sodas and ignoring any other possible side effects I think the big problem is that they still taste sweet so it seems like they still feed the craving loop for sugar without containing any sugar.

It's early days yet but I think I can already notice some difference. Like I had ice cream tonight that I've had many times before and it tasted too sweet.

Anyway I think it's impossible to talk about caffeine consumption without also considering sugar consumption because they really do go hand in hand.

Caffeine is a stimulant and seems like it can be used to enhance some activities including athletic ones [1].

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/03/how-athle...

4 cups of coffee in a row don't do anything to me and adding more makes me asleep. I guess I am one of those for whom coffee is just one of ways to stay hydrated and nothing else. Similarly alcohol, it doesn't affect my thoughts just coordination, I am not more open/brave/socially whatever with it. I guess I should be a monk...