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Comment by mykowebhn | Hacker News Reader

When we parametrize complex systems in studies such as this, I feel we tend to lose the forest for the trees.

Okay, so maybe 25 cups of coffee a day won't destroy my heart.

But this is what happens when I have 5 cups of coffee a day:

1) I get jumpy and I feel anxious. If I drink too much I start to feel what I can only describe as existential dread (I know it's weird).

2) I can't hold on to things because my hands are shaking.

3) I don't sleep as well at night, even if I don't drink any coffee after 12pm.

4) My lymph nodes start to swell. (This last one was really weird for me when I found out that it was caffeine that was causing the lumps in my breast. I'm pretty sure it's the caffeine since both times I had the lumps I quit coffee cold-turkey and the lumps disappeared.)

I now limit myself to two cups of coffee per day. If I'm feeling indulgent I may have a third cup, but that's not daily.

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I think the point here is that people with heart disease needn't worry too much about coffee/caffeine intake. Heart disease affects a large part of the population and even among those who are not effected heart health is still something to be conscious of, especially in middle and old age.

Agreed, they're not condoning or advocating for high consumption. They're simply establishing that even when drinking absurd amounts of coffee you're not at increased risk, therefore it is ok to drink coffee.

That is wrong, what they say here is that arteries may not suffer by drinking coffee. But there is a lot of evidence pointing that all sorts of arythmias can be connected to caffeine intake...

> If I drink too much I start to feel what I can only describe as existential dread (I know it's weird).

Not weird at all. It’s that free-form, nameless, unspecified anxiety.

+1 here. I can't describe it, but it's like a feeling that I'm about to die, that everything is about to end. Needless to say, it's not pleasant.

I love the taste of coffee, had cafe au lait as a kid, then brewed, then french press and stove top moka pot. The last two methods slowly made me sick. It turns out when not using a paper filter, things like cafestol makes it through the process in higher concentration and after a few days of consumption I would get intense pain near my liver/gallbladder, for about 30 minutes I would be on the bathroom floor waiting for it to pass, often only vomiting helped. I stopped coffee and those symptoms stopped. Later tried poured over coffee with a paper filter , after a few days those symptoms would come back. Decaf doesn't help. Now in my late 30s I can't have coffee, tea or chocolate. The caffeine/theine/theobromine was not good either, anxiety, headaches, muscle twitching, heart palpitations, irritability, leading to, sorry for the detail, dehydration and hard stools. It's been a year since I've stopped, and I feel serene, easier to stay hydrated, better sleep and great bowel movement. If someone can invent the impossible burger equivalent of coffee (no caffeine, cafestol, roasting carcinogens ...) I'll be first in line, not sure how long that line would be though.

Chicory's a pretty good impossible burger equivalent. Not sure on its carcinogenic status though.

You also experience decreased blood-flow to the brain, especially when abstaining from coffee after periods of chronic use:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2748160/

Two is my general limit as well.

I've had conversations about an issue with someone at work and the response was "Three cups today huh man?"

I get a bit worked up sometimes with that third cup.

A few years ago I just decided to give up caffeine entirely. It wasn't worth the impact on my sleep or the stop-everything-and-find-caffeine headaches I got. I became uncomfortable with the fact that, in some small way, a substance exerted that much control over my life.

Did you replace it with something else?

LaCroix

> When we parametrize complex systems in studies such as this, I feel we tend to lose the forest for the trees.

I think that's an unfair accusation. The study set out to answer a very specific question, and did so. Knowledge often progresses by building big pictures out of the answers to lots of little questions. In terms of your forest metaphor, I would say that the study is "identifying some specific groups of trees in the forest".

Also, studies like this don’t how it’s heathy, they simply fail to demonstrate significant harm over the course of the study which is a very different thing.

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