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- WTF Wednesday - Me Myself & Caffeine
Welcome back to the Daily Dumbbell, where we get mad at online personalities and fact check their inane arguments so you don’t have to. Today we poured over the research on coffee. Eh? Poured?
Honestly if we could drink a cup of puns in the morning we’d be just fine.
Anyway we found some absolutely Ludacris arguments about caffeine floating around out there so we dove into the literature. When we move read you move read… Just like that.
Ok that’s enough.
Let’s dive in!
The Mechanism Obsession
Nearly every disagreement you’ll find in the world of Nutrition boils down to one thing: How zoomed in are you?
Some people zoom in too close…
d
They argue that because coffee causes the body to release cortisol it must be bad. Likely because stress also causes an increase in cortisol.
This in turn causes them to create dumb fucking content like this:
@dr_idz CAFFEINE INCREASES CORTISOL, BELLY FAT & DAMAGES THE BRAIN!! 😱❌☕️ #weightloss #fatloss #nutrition #fitness
Where they fear monger to thousands of people before getting absolutely dunked on by Dr Idz who actually understands the literature.
Not only is the cortisol spike transient, cortisol isn’t even inherently bad. What else causes an increase in cortisol? Simply waking up in the morning. Exercising. It’s also required to mobilize fat for fat loss.
You cannot look at an immediate reaction - an uptick in cortisol - and extrapolate that to mean all sorts of bad things. Not only is it lazy, it’s flat out wrong. Why? Lets talk about it.
If you want to understand how coffee consumption impacts people, you’d conduct a study where you tracked caffeine intake. Then you’d compare the people who drank no coffee to the people who did and you’d see if the more coffee people drank, the fatter they got, or the worse outcomes they’d have.
Hopefully someone conducts one of the…
Wait, you’re telling us they’ve done this?
Thousands of times?
You mean to tell us there’s a veritable shit ton of research on this and Doc Amen ignored all of it to spout his nonsense? Huh…
Ok… well what does it show? Better outcomes for people who drink caffeine than people who don’t.
In a review of 200 Meta analyses, Coffee intake showed a reduction in:
All cause mortality
Cardiovascular incidents
Cancer
Neurological & metabolic conditions
Caffeine intake also improves performance in both:
This Meta Analysis showed “significant & immediate” improvements to:
jump height
reaction time &
agility
This is what happens when you assume an outcome based on a micro response. Except you’re not making an ass out of us. Just yourself Doc.
Hopefully you enjoyed today’s salty newsletter! Let us know if you have any nonsensical videos you’d like us to set the record straight on. Either way, we’ll see you back here on Friday for some of the good things we found this week.