Coffee Addicts: The Calculus of Caffeine Consumption

Got this from Arvind Narayan’s blog post, in which he takes us through his research on caffeine consumption from a scientific point of view (Click on his blog to read the full analysis), with pretty cool results and analysis for Coffee Addicts (which are generally the corporate riff-raff) and how to use caffeiene to your best advantage.

I’ll just cover his basic results here:

1) Caffeine tolerance builds up rather quickly (2-3 weeks) and further, is near-total. That means that if you drink coffee regularly, pretty soon you start producing more adenosine in respose; thus you need your caffeine dose just to get up to your normal level of brain activity, and you’re dopey if you don’t take it.

2)  Caffeine blocks adenosine receptors in the brain (by tricking your brain into thinking it is adenosine.) A decrease in the activity of adenosine (which is a sleep chemical) increases neuron firing rate and increases focus and concentration.  (see above picture)

3)The best time to drink coffee is when you are already very alert.

4) When adenosine peaks, the best response is not to fight it, but “go with the flow” and (shock, gasp) sleep.  Sleep has effects on memory consolidation and is extremely beneficial in overcoming cognitive bottlenecks, making the brain maximally alert right after waking up. Thus, a possibly very effective coffee drinking pattern would be two cups a day, one early in the morning and one right after an afternoon nap. (Unfortunately, napping is stigmatized in the Western work culture, despite much scientific evidence touting the benefits. I hear that such stigmatization is non-existent in China. Good for them.)

5) Consistent caffeine consumption is as good as nonconsumption, because of (you guessed it) tolerance. a better strategy is periodic abstinence, it lets adenosine levels return to normal. With complete abstinence, it takes 5 days to reach adenosine normality; conservatively, and with imperfect abstinence, a week or 10 days may be required.

That’s about it… interesting eh?  What wasn’t covered in the research and what I’m interested in is the placebo effect of caffeine. As far as I recall there was some research done where 10 people were in a room 9 were given pure caffeine and 1 was given concentrated valium (all of them were told they were being given concentrated caffeine, and in another room it was vice versa.  In each case the subjects given valium in a caffeiene context and caffeine in a valium context had still manifested symptoms as the rest of the group in their particular context.  Hence, both the caffeine and valium had the opposite effect in those individuals.  word.

All in All, I think the above research has very interesting insights into coffee addicts planning their coffee consumption to get the most benefit.  Other than that I just don’t think most people would really care.