I – like many of my peers – have assumed for a long time that decaffeinated coffee had more than just the caffeine removed. But I’ve never stopped to wonder, does decaf offer any of the benefits of regular? Science has looked into it and come up with the answer…
It turns out that decaf retains many of the compounds and biologicals that regular coffee contains. And both regular and decaf have their pros and cons…
What they did
A new study by researchers at University College Cork (Ireland), published in Nature Communications, sought to determine if coffee had any of the same effects on drinkers with and without caffeine.
According to a story in Food & Wine, the study, “followed 62 healthy adults between the ages of 30 and 50, evenly split between regular coffee drinkers (three to five cups a day) and people who never drink coffee. At baseline, the two groups were essentially identical across measures such as body mass, blood pressure, stress, anxiety, and sleep quality. But their gut microbiomes revealed their coffee habits.”
The coffee drinkers were asked to abstain for two weeks. Then the researchers reintroduced coffee, with half the coffee drinkers receiving caffeinated and half decaf. None of the participants knew which they were drinking.
What they found
Both groups reported reductions in stress, depression and impulsivity. I was surprised to hear that, because I thought only the regular coffee drinkers would report ‘relief’ symptoms, like addicts back on their drug of choice. Which suggests to me that there’s a definite ‘expectation factor’ involved when folks imbibe their cup of Java.
But both groups also experienced mood improvements and showed coffee-linked shifts in their gut microbiomes. That result illustrating that the gut responds to coffee itself, not just caffeine.
The takeaway
Contrary to my previous apprehensions, it appears coffee delivers a lot of its recently discovered benefits to both mind and body whether it’s regular or decaffeinated.
My take
What really impresses itself on me is the fact that both decaf and regular coffee drinkers reported reductions in largely subjective effects usually attributed to caffeine – stress, depression and impulsivity – during the caffeine vs. regular phase of the study.
That, if nothing else, demonstrates what I’ve already dubbed a significant ‘expectation factor’, that determines what coffee drinkers expect to get out of a jolt of Joe. And which they report receiving, caffeine or none…
~ Maggie J.