Time.news – Something new every day. Coffee and its properties never stop making headlines. This time it’s the turn of caffeine, on the effects of which opinions are often controversial. What does it actually do?, wonders the Guardian. Does it keep you awake? Does it neutralize sleep? Does it give energy and is it an invigorator in sports performance? How much can you drink? Does two or three coffees a day have the same effects as a drug? Questions, many. But the answers?
The London newspaper writes that to tell the truth “the effects can begin even before taking a sip” because “just inhaling the scent of coffee can improve memory and stimulate alertness”, according to the results of a study dated 2019 , tested on 80 young people aged 18-22.
Research from 2018 argues, however, that people who have inhaled the perfume “performed better in tests related to analytical reasoning”. But if just smelling it produces these effects, what is it like to drink real coffee instead? “There is a possibility that it has a placebo effect,” says Dr. Mike T. Nelson, a performance research specialist who recently endorsed the International Society of Sports Nutrition’s position on coffee: Under the effect of caffeine a cup of coffee our performance improves. Even just 10 minutes after ingestion while 45 minutes after you have the peak concentration in the blood. In short, “LCaffeine acts as a central nervous system stimulant, making you more alert and focused, but potentially also more irritable and anxiousi” because it is “a mood enhancer”.
A recent 2020 research, applied to amateur cyclists, certified that “coffee improved performance by an average of 1.7%”: it may not seem like a lot, but this is a big problem even for moderately competitive athletes, he says the newspaper. Why? “For athletes who use it exclusively to improve performance, the advice is to take caffeine in pill form, because they can better control the effects of its intake”.
In any case, the way you drink it “makes the difference”.
That is, darker blends, in addition to having less caffeine, “tend to contain fewer antioxidants and lower levels of chlorogenic acid, a compound that can protect the body from inflammation and cellular damage.” When you grind the beans doesn’t matter, but how much you grind them does, because “a finer grind releases more polyphenols, giving slightly more beneficial effects”. Coffee filtered through paper can be healthier than coffee made with a metal filter (in a coffee pot, for example) or without a filter.
A study published in 2020, which analyzed more than 500,000 healthy coffee drinkers over nearly two decades, found that “those who drank filtered coffee had lower rates of arterial disease and death.” The authors concluded that the substances contained in coffee that can increase LDL cholesterol – the “bad” one – “can be removed using a filter”; they also claim that a cup of unfiltered coffee typically contains about 30 times the concentration of the lipid-boosting substances compared to filtered coffee.
In the end, what’s the recommendation? “Up to three cups a day is probably fine, strained if possible, dark roasted if you’re trying to cut down on caffeine, but light if you’re looking to benefit from the other ingredients.””. “Spacing them apart in the morning” and trying to “leave a decent gap” after the last cup “before going to bed”…