What the research says — and doesn't say — about caffeine and what comes after.
A reader emailed me a screenshot of a supplement label — caffeine and L-theanine, in a tidy 1:2 ratio — and asked the question I get more than almost any oth...
A patient in her second trimester asked me this one recently, and she asked it the way a lot of people do — already half-relieved, because a wellness article...
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 ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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?