What puzzles me about the reported birth of coffee is that I wouldn't expect that just eating the cherries would give you that much of a caffeine kick to be noticeable. Yes, there's a little bit of caffeine in them, but far more in the "beans" (seeds).
Tea also has noticeably less caffeine than coffee, yet it has been treated as an energizing drink since it was first discovered.
When you don't have any adrenal stimulants in your diet at all, even a small amount is noticable.
Caffeine also has a metabolic half life of roughly 5 hours in the body, if I remember correctly. A few berries might not do much, but surely a handful will be enough.
Caffeine synthesis involves several enzymes, but the enzyme family (called the SABATH family) involved in the final stages of its synthesis can trace its origins back to the first land plants. These first enzymes are thought to have been very promiscuous (capable of having activity with several molecules), partially contributing to how caffeine synthesis managed to evolve independently multiple times throughout the evolutionary history of land plants.
Somehow caffeine from Maté feels different though. To me coffee gives a fast spike and then comedown, while Maté's effect is more balanced, and lasts longer. And I don't think it's just caffeine content, because tea is nothing like that for me.
For staying productive for hours, nothing beats Maté for me (except stimulant medication).
This is why I routinely wean myself from coffee by drinking tea on most holiday weekends. I feel it helps me to dissociate less while I should be present with family, plus when I return to work I have much less residual caffeine and can hit peak productivity, crank out some code. Props to devs who don’t rely on drugs!
If you truly detox from caffeine even extremely small amounts will be noticeable. I knew a woman who couldn't eat chocolate because she found the amount of caffeine to be too high. I didn't even know there was caffeine in chocolate.
Depends on the chocolate type and how much you're eating. Milk chocolate has very low levels (~2mg per 28oz), but dark chocolate is ~15mg per 28oz. Coffee, at 24oz, would be around 275mg, depending.
I find it hard to believe that some folks would feel the caffeine in chocolate unless they ate an entire dark chocolate bar in one sitting, but I suppose it's possible.
I think that 28oz of dark chocolate, whether weight or volume, would be a ludicrous amount to eat in one sitting. A chocolate bar is about 1.5 oz (and 1 fluid ounce of water weighs 1 ounce, at least to a rough approximation), so to eat 28 you'd need to eat nearly 20 chocolate bars.
For that matter 24oz is rather a lot of coffee to drink at once. I brew my daily coffee with 200g of water, or only about 7 floz.
While I realize I'm an outlier, I do NOT consider 24oz of coffee a lot, nor does anyone I know--that's literally a standard coffee cup at a coffee shop these days. At a minimum, I'm drinking 3 pots (~180oz) of coffee a day, with my usual being 3-4x that amount.
So; with that said, while I believe that eating 28oz of chocolate is a lot, I guess it could happen :-)
Wait, on a typical day you're drinking 4-5.5 gallons of coffee? 180oz * 3-4? So 540-720oz?
That's not just an outlier, that's absurd. At 100mg caffeine per 8oz of coffee, that's over 6 grams of coffee per day, or more than 15 times the amount generally considered safe.
But the comment also said "with my usual being 3-4x that amount". I don't know how to square the math in that comment except to interpret it as "180oz is my minimum, my usual is 3-4 times as much as 180oz".
I went almost caffeine free at one point. I once got a good buzz from 300g of 90% chocolate.
I say "almost" caffeine free because I still regularly ate chocolate. So I still had a little tolerance. Yet the difference between 50g of milk chocolate and 300g of 90% was very noticeable.
>If you truly detox from caffeine even extremely small amounts will be noticeable.
Maybe for a subset of people. Otherwise kids will be getting crazy jitters the first time they eat chocolate (presumably before they ever drank coffee/tea), which obviously doesn't happen.
They call the cherries cascara, and I have come across them in some specialty coffee shops packaged just like the beans. You can pour hot (not boiling) water over them and prepare a tea-like infusion. It tastes sweet-ish without adding anything else. It gives a pretty noticeable kick to me when I drink it, even though I am a regular coffee drinker. I think it is worth a try, if you haven't done so yet.
