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I came to carob sideways. A recipe-testing client wanted a hot chocolate their evening-sensitive customers could drink at 9pm without lying awake, and cocoa ...
If you’ve cut back on coffee and then found yourself lying awake after an evening square of 85 percent dark, you’ve probably wondered the obvious thing: how ...
Two roots keep showing up at the top of every “what can I drink instead of coffee” list: chicory and dandelion. They look almost identical in the mug — dark,...
A few weeks ago I wrote a day-by-day log of my first two weeks off caffeine. I ended it on day 16, said the trade was worth it, and promised — mostly to myse...
A patient brought her two-week-old to a visit recently and asked, almost apologetically, whether she had to give up her morning cup entirely now that she was...
A reader emailed last month asking what to make of the small bag of “honeybush” her aunt had brought back from Cape Town. The aunt’s pitch had been character...
Every May we get a wave of the same email: it is warming up, the reader has happily given up coffee, and now they want a cold-brew version of whatever they h...
Of all the questions readers send me, “should I switch from coffee to matcha?” is the one I most consistently answer with another question: what part of coff...
The first morning I quit coffee, I sat at my kitchen counter at 6:40 a.m. waiting for the version of myself that opens the laptop and starts doing things, an...
A friend asked me at dinner last weekend whether rooibos really had zero caffeine, or whether that was one of those things people say that turns out to have ...
This is the second time I’ve done fourteen days off caffeine. The first time was eighteen months ago and lasted nine months. This one started two Mondays bac...
I make a hot drink every winter morning and an iced drink every summer afternoon. The hot one I can wing — chicory in a French press, splash of milk, done. T...
Patients ask me a version of this question every week. They are on a 16:8 or an 18:6 schedule, they have figured out that plain coffee is fine, and they want...
Every few weeks a reader emails us some version of the same question: “I’m trying to quit coffee — should I get Teeccino or Dandy Blend?” Both names come up ...
A patient asked me last week whether dandelion root coffee would “reset her liver” after a stressful work trip. I told her what I tell most people who ask me...
A friend of mine started drinking yerba mate last fall on the recommendation of a trainer who told her it had “more caffeine than coffee but cleaner.” She la...
About a third of the patients who come to me asking for “a nutrition plan” are really there because they’ve started to suspect that their coffee is hurting t...
A reader emailed me last month asking why every mushroom-coffee bag in her cupboard called itself “adaptogenic” while the bottle of ashwagandha in her medici...
I see the same question in clinic three or four times a month. A patient sits down, pulls out a bag of chicory coffee, and asks why something so frequently r...
Four Sigmatic has been around long enough that it’s no longer the underdog. When we started covering mushroom coffee, Four Sigmatic was the brand readers had...
I get asked about chicory lattes more than any other drink on this site. Some people want a creamy caffeine-free morning ritual, some are tapering off coffee...
The first time I tried carob coffee, I had no idea what I was tasting. The mug looked like coffee. The smell was warm and faintly cocoa-like but not quite ch...
The question lands in my inbox at least once a week, usually from a reader who has just been diagnosed with prediabetes or who is tracking glucose with a con...
A friend texted me last spring with a screenshot from an Instagram wellness account claiming that “decaf coffee is one of the worst things you can drink.” Sh...
I drank coffee every morning for nineteen years. Then for about eighteen months I didn’t. Then I started again. Then I cut back. Along the way I tried, in ro...
I’ll say the loud part first: chicory root is the best coffee alternative you can buy for under ten dollars. I’ve tried all of them — mushroom powders, carob...
People lump them together — “coffee without the caffeine” — and then get confused when they don’t taste the same, or when the decaf still gives them heartbur...
We get this question a lot: is mushroom coffee actually better than regular coffee, or is it a trend with good marketing? The answer, like a lot of things, i...
If you’ve landed here, you’ve probably already figured out that “caffeine-free” is a bigger tent than it sounds. It includes the herbal blends that try to ta...
Somewhere in year two of drinking herbal coffee daily, it stops being a substitute and starts being the thing itself. You stop comparing it to coffee. You st...
Chicory coffee is one of those drinks that feels new to a lot of Americans and is, in fact, two centuries old. It was the workaround during the Continental B...
Somewhere between the third LinkedIn post about “brain fog” and the fourth Instagram ad for adaptogens, most of us have heard the pitch for mushroom coffee. ...
A couple of years ago, the big claim in the coffee-adjacent internet was that a morning cup could make you productive. Now the pitch has flipped. Every third...
When a pregnant client asks me whether they can drink mushroom coffee, there are really two questions tangled together: one about caffeine, and one about the...
This question comes up in my clinical practice more than almost any other coffee-alternative question. Pregnant clients have usually already cut caffeine (or...
On day 2 of my first real attempt at quitting coffee, I poured myself a glass of water with lemon and stared at it like it had personally insulted me. The pr...
When I was reporting on addiction medicine a decade ago, I was surprised to learn that caffeine withdrawal was a formal diagnostic entity. I had thought of c...
One of the most common questions I get from clients cutting caffeine is the most practical one: how long is this going to last?
I have quit caffeine four times. The first time was cold turkey, a Monday morning, and by Tuesday evening I had a headache so bad I thought I was getting the...