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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...