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228 points curmudgeon22 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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PragmaticPulp ◴[] No.26612365[source]
> Subjects ingested 3 mg/kg of caffeine or a placebo at 8am and 5pm

3mg/kg is over 250mg of caffeine for an average weight man. Twice a day makes that 500mg.

An 8.4oz can of Red Bull contains 80mg of caffeine. They were giving these people an amount of caffeine equivalent to 6 cans of Red Bull. Not a perfect comparison because Red Bull contains other ingredients, but that's still a lot of caffeine. For another point of reference, that's 2.5 shots of 5 hour energy (200mg caffeine per bottle).

To top it off, the subjects were caffeine-naive, so they had no caffeine tolerance. They must have been feeling extremely energetic.

No wonder they burned more fat. I'm not sure this is going to translate to your casual coffee drinker or someone with a high caffeine tolerance.

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hombre_fatal ◴[] No.26612954[source]
Almost seems like you're trying to sensationalize it by changing it to Red Bull, something that's actually pretty low in caffeine once you put marketing aside.

How about comparing it to Starbucks' regular hot coffee sizes?

- Short - 180 mg

- Tall - 260 mg

- Grande - 330 mg

- Venti - 415 mg

Is drinking a 12oz Tall at Starbucks really dropping your jaw?

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coderintherye ◴[] No.26613004[source]
That's a fair point, Starbucks coffee has more caffeine than an average cup of coffee. I'm sure many people (including myself) are not aware of that.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-caf...

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arcticbull ◴[] No.26613095[source]
The amount of caffeine in a coffee depends on its extraction method, the grind, and to a lesser extent on roast. An espresso actually has much less caffeine than a cup of drip (60mg vs 200mg). Generally the longer you leave the beans exposed to water the more caffeine comes out, up to about 400 minutes when making cold brew. [1]

I doubt Starbucks is deviously out to over-caffeinate its customers (although if they were, they've got my vote!) but rather the difference is attributable to variations in their brewing process.

There's a limit to the amount of caffeine that can possibly come out of a bean, and so I would say that unless there's evidence they're spiking the brew, that Starbucks coffee is roughly the definition of an "average cup of coffee"

A Venti is 590mL and 415mg of caffeine, 700mg/L of coffee. Based on the chart in [1] that would be roughly speaking the midpoint of roast kind at the 150 minute mark making cold brew, 10g/100mL of coffee beans (Figure 1). Or approximately a dark roast, coarse grind hot brew (Figure 3).

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5740146/

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1. okprod ◴[] No.26621906[source]
> An espresso actually has much less caffeine than a cup of drip (60mg vs 200mg).

I think espresso has more caffeine per ounce than coffee does.