Before I quit caffeine, I looked at decaf coffee the way I looked at nonalcoholic beer. What the hell is the point? (For the record, I’ve since quit drinking, too, so the joke’s on me twice.)
A small new study from University College Cork has given me a slightly better answer. Researchers took 31 people who normally drank three to five cups of coffee a day and made them quit for two weeks. After that, half went back to caffeinated coffee, and the other half drank decaf, without knowing what they’d been given.
Once coffee was reintroduced, people in both groups reported lower stress and impulsivity. The caffeinated group also saw improvements in anxiety and attention. But the decaf drinkers did something the caffeinated group didn’t: They improved on two memory tests involving words and locations.
Scientists Found a Surprising Benefit of Decaf Coffee
Researchers think your gut could have something to do with it. Coffee contains more than a thousand compounds, and caffeine is only one of them. Coffee also contains polyphenols, plant compounds that gut bacteria happily eat. When researchers analyzed stool samples, the microbiome changed during the two weeks without coffee and changed again after coffee came back, regardless of whether it contained caffeine.
“But I guess the most surprising thing was that when we put coffee back, we also got really exciting effects by putting decaffeinated coffee back,” neuroscientist John Cryan, who led the work, said in a video about the study. He also pointed out that this was a small experiment. Thirty-one coffee drinkers is nowhere near enough people to rewrite everything we know about coffee, but it does make decaf harder to dismiss as sad brown water.
I have a personal reason for being interested in all of this. About a year ago, genetic testing showed that my body doesn’t process caffeine well. Around 95% of the caffeine you drink is metabolized by a liver enzyme produced by the CYP1A2 gene, and some people break it down much slower than others. I am one of those lucky people. Coffee on an empty stomach was stressing my body out.
I thought I’d miss the caffeine. What I actually missed was the ritual: making coffee, drinking it hot, having that first cup in the morning. Decaf still gave me all of that.
And if this study holds up, there could be much more to coffee than the caffeine anyway.
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