when you compare caffeine to paraxanthine, are you comparing caffeine pills or coffee? cuz coffee has a bunch of other things in there that could be confounding. its also really hard to isolate eg gut motility, receptor saturation, circadian dynamics in PK, so prolly good to normalize those if comparing.
curious about whether the crash is worse, if anyone caffeine crash prone tries, would be cool to get an update
Good point, I’ve been comparing to coffee. There could also be placebo effects since I associate coffee with stimulation. I’m also not sure how much I should trust the claimed caffeine content of the coffee pods I was using. I’ll update the post to mention these.
Their method of analysis seems sound, and they find considerable variability across at least this brand of coffee pods. Caffeine content of resulting coffee varied with serving size on the order of 10-20 mg, max-min varied by 40 or 30 mg though for this I’m pretty sure they considered all 4 measurements for a given type of pod (2 measurements for small size and 2 for large), which is not a lot, so the data is pretty noisy, but it’s enough to see that the caffeine content on the packaging is not to be trusted (unless your brand of coffee pods uses some weird process that doesnt involve caffeine coming from the beans themselves).
Also a note for their comparisons to manufacturer contents—they compare the All means to listed content, which is weird since people probably consume one of the coffee serving sizes, not both, so it’s understating the difference from listed contents.
when you compare caffeine to paraxanthine, are you comparing caffeine pills or coffee? cuz coffee has a bunch of other things in there that could be confounding. its also really hard to isolate eg gut motility, receptor saturation, circadian dynamics in PK, so prolly good to normalize those if comparing.
curious about whether the crash is worse, if anyone caffeine crash prone tries, would be cool to get an update
Good point, I’ve been comparing to coffee. There could also be placebo effects since I associate coffee with stimulation. I’m also not sure how much I should trust the claimed caffeine content of the coffee pods I was using. I’ll update the post to mention these.
with respect to caffeine content of coffee pods: Was able to find this (paywalled) study https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0260106018810941#core-collateral-purchase-access
Their method of analysis seems sound, and they find considerable variability across at least this brand of coffee pods. Caffeine content of resulting coffee varied with serving size on the order of 10-20 mg, max-min varied by 40 or 30 mg though for this I’m pretty sure they considered all 4 measurements for a given type of pod (2 measurements for small size and 2 for large), which is not a lot, so the data is pretty noisy, but it’s enough to see that the caffeine content on the packaging is not to be trusted (unless your brand of coffee pods uses some weird process that doesnt involve caffeine coming from the beans themselves).
Also a note for their comparisons to manufacturer contents—they compare the All means to listed content, which is weird since people probably consume one of the coffee serving sizes, not both, so it’s understating the difference from listed contents.