Beginning mid-2023 I began brewing and drinking a quad shot of espresso every morning, using the Natural Grocers Organic fair trade dark Espresso Roast, an Arabic bean which has 1.2% caffeine by weight. Filling my Mr. Coffee espresso maker to the 4-level, that was approximately 400mg of caffeine daily1. It produced a significant laxative effect every day and gave me a stomach ache, which felt pretty terrible when I did intermittent fasting. I would usually feel an afternoon slump and sometimes take down maybe one more espresso shot at work. Every time I worked out, I was already sore before moving a single weight, like I had been working out super hard the previous day. I assumed this was because I was just getting old. I powered through it and would get home and by about 6pm be pretty thoroughly exhausted.
Over the course of two years it became harder and harder to just get through the day. I was more easily agitated in the afternoon, and I was basically a wreck when I got home.
In mid-2025 the thought occurred to me, “Is coffee preventing me from digesting food?” So I stopped drinking coffee cold turkey. After a three-day hangover, I started drinking Yerba Mate tea. The laxative effect, the afternoon slump, the muscle soreness, and the evening energy depletion were suddenly gone. I could lift weights far more easily… hell, I could squat down and pick things up off the ground without muscle fatigue. I would say the quality of life improvements after getting off coffee have been significant.
When I tell people this, they will say, “But a quad shot is insane.” I guess so, but then I looked up the caffeine content of a Starbucks venti hot coffee: a venti dark roast has 340mg of caffeine, venti Pike Place has 410 mg, and a venti Blonde Roast has 470mg2. A venti Blonde Roast with two shots would have 625mg of caffeine, more than twice what I was drinking.
Based on a recently-published study3, 5 million Starbucks drinks are sold daily, and ~10-14% of those contain 400 mg of caffeine each. So approximately 1.5 million Starbucks customers have at least as bad, if not worse, a condition as I had.
Looking at broader patterns of caffeine consumption in the USA, this study found that 15-18% of Americans as a whole drink 400+ mg of caffeine daily, the same amount that was sapping the life out of me. “Experts” consider this totally fine:
Cornelius adds: “Most data claimed that coffee is beneficial for health. In 2015 for the first time, the U.S Guidelines indicated that coffee might be part of a healthy diet. They suggested that 5 cups per day is safe. In 2020 it was suggested that very young individuals (from birth to 23 months) should avoid coffee completely. Also, pregnant women should avoid consuming less than 300 mg of caffeine in order not to affect the infant. Healthy adults could consume safely 400 mg of caffeine per day. When it comes to cola and energy drinks, the only danger discussed was in contact of sugar content only”.
The FDA also stated that caffeine can be part of a healthy diet for most people but to much caffeine can pose some danger to the health. The symptoms can be: increased heart rate, nausea, headache and high blood pressure. Generally, for most adults, 400 mg of caffeine is considered safe. (emphasis mine)
Again, the FDA says that 400 mg of caffeine, the same amount that was causing significant problems for me, is safe. And 50-60 million Americans are doing this daily.
Well that’s a big effing problem, isn’t it?
Of course it’s possible there were other contributing factors to my problems, but during that same period I was eating a very healthy diet (entirely organic, never eating out but always home cooked, mostly vegetarian with occasional meat, with very infrequent desserts), regular exercise varying from short and intense to the usual day-long, high-burn motion capture sessions, and zero alcohol or drugs. I’ve maintained a 7-hour-per-night sleep schedule, with occasional naps, I don’t work on Shabbat, my stress levels are generally low, I don’t deal with traffic, I’m not in debt, I have no other health issues…
The only health issue I had was an intestinal one, an inguinal hernia, which I had repaired in Jan 2025, but I experienced no change in symptoms until mid-2025 when I got off coffee.
I would estimate my physical health is generally in the upper percentile of Americans, if only because of my diet and sobriety. If 400 mg of caffeine daily caused such a significant decrease in quality of life for me, I would expect it to be as bad if not worse for 15% of other Americans. That’s nuts. And the fact that the FDA considers this healthy is utter bat sh~t craziness.