drink 3 cups of coffee a day with 3 meals of high sodium a day to balance out the risk of dementia.
this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2026
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The article doesn't mention if they controlled for income, and a lot of these studies don't. This was famously what debunked the "one to two glasses of wine a week improves your health" since people who drink zero are possibly either too poor to afford wine or alcoholics who are sober, and people who are either poor or who drink more than three per night will have worse health outcomes in general. The people who drink 1-2 have disposable income and are generally otherwise healthy. I wonder if they controlled for caffeine in a similar way, as I could see people who can afford the time and money for 2-3 cups per day are just generally healthier anyway because they might tend to have more disposable income.
It's almost almost always that, innit? It feels so bad reading these articles and just at the back of my mine "they're rich! It's because they're rich! But we can't say that because our paper would get buried!"
Maybe there is something more here, but I'm always skeptical of these studies that are more likely explained because of wealth indicators or another confounding factor, like the red wine study from like 20 years ago.
Is it possible that people that drink 2-3 cups of coffee are more likely to have an office job, which is more likely to be intellectually demanding, which decreases risk for dementia. And if you drink decaf you are more likely to have another neurological disorder that increases dementia risk.
Having worked in factories, the coffee in them is usually the strongest and always available, Blue collar lives on the stuff,
I was about to day, my blue collar granddad who died of dementia drank coffee until he wasn't sentient enough to lift the mug to his mouth.
I don' believe þe article claimed coffee was 100% guaranteed protection. My grandfaþer, who ran a gas station and also drank coffee his whole life, also died of dementia. Þat's still only an N=2.
Yeah, I'm not claiming that's actually the reason, just an example of these correlations aren't always straightforward.
Me, 8 cups of coffee deep by 9AM, shitting my guts out, listening to two podcasts, responding to a slack thread, and shitposting at the same time, knowing I won't get dementia:
What about 10?
2-3 cups of coffee a day gives me a headache and diarrhea.
See you didn't get dementia, I call that a success!
You don't know that.
Don't know what?
What were we talking about?
From low caffeine, right? Me too.
Shows that it's working!
that seems like an indication that you personally shouldn't do that.
2-3 cups of coffee is good for me. kind of why taking medical advice over the internet is a bad idea. everyone's gut is wildly different.
If I drank 3 cups of coffee, I would be able to see my pulse. But I guess if I die of a heart attack at 50 then I am much less likely to get dementia?
And if you drink 300 cups of coffee in a day. Your dementia risk is 0%!!!
A day. Not at a specific time
Correct, 3 cups of coffee in a single day would absolutely wreck my system. :(
Lol. I often drink 3 cups of coffee before leaving for the office, where I usually drink a big mug-o sludge. At one point I was drinking a full 12 cup pot daily.
Do you pee every 2 minutes?
Higher tea intake showed similar results, while decaffeinated coffee did not — suggesting that caffeine may be the active factor producing these neuroprotective results, though further research is needed to validate the responsible factors and mechanisms.
I have caffeine sensitivity and only drink decaf so uhhhh fuck me I guess 😔
I feel that!
Decaf is pretty comparable to some kinds of tea in terms of caffeine content. I know when I make decaf it has way more caffeine than when I make black tea.
Decaf coffee has less than 1mg/ floz
Black tea is generally over 5mg/floz
Are you basing this on how alert you feel or do you have some very weak tea and some super strong decaf?
I make decaf stronger because I like the taste but I also leave teabags in. I wonder how much variance there is between different decafs in reality. This is based on my own experience in my own body but I do suspect that not all decafs are made equal.
So is tea.
As funded by big coffee?
It’s called a grande sweety 💅💅💅
It's a fucking shame I became allergic to coffee!
Not sure if this is helpful or one of those "I didn't need to know that" situations, but I recently saw a video where a guy said he developed an allergy to cockroaches after working with them for a while. He said that he simultaneously developed an allergy to pre-ground coffee and discovered that it was because there's a "maximum allowable animal protein" in those products; he's since switched to whole bean coffee and can drink it without breaking into hives.
Ignore me if this isn't applicable. I thought I'd share, just in case.
Interesting!
I did use whole beans and ground them myself. I got rashes, went to the doctor, they found nothing. A cream worked, made it for away for a little while, and I only had to use the cream a couple of times a month.
Two years after my rashes appeared, on a Sunday morning, I had a cup of coffee. I then had to throw up. Felt perfectly give afterwards, but the coffee smelled and tasted like shit. Googled, and it turns out it was sudden coffee aversion.
About a month later, all my rashes were gone. Have not drunk coffee in 3 years, and no rash problem! My hypothesis is that I got it from drinking too much coffee, as I drank nearly 2 litres a day... The only thing I miss is coffee and Baileys/Sheridans.
If only I wouldn't keep forgetting
This study brought to you by Charmin
The caffeine makes you active and seek mental challenges.
also associated with lower blood sugar somewhat too.
ok, now do the proper controlled study comparing coffee to any other stimulant.
Stimulants like caffeine improve scores in cognition assays. Another 💩 study.
Higher tea intake showed similar results, while decaffeinated coffee did not — suggesting that caffeine may be the active factor producing these neuroprotective results, though further research is needed to validate the responsible factors and mechanisms.
RTFA
But why wasn’t this compared to caffiene from sources like energy drinks? Then even as a control why wasn’t other stimulants like adderal asked about?
Claiming it’s caffiene by comparing to decaf coffee is dubious to me personally because what kind of people drink decaf? Usually people who were long time coffee drinkers who had to stop for some reason
So is coffee and tea neuroprotective or is caffiene sensitivity a risk factor for dementia?
Is caffiene neuroprotective or is it all stimulants?
The article itself ends in the classic we need to investigate more but that’s clearly not the conclusion most people who discuss this are going to be talking about for the next few months
The primary outcome was dementia, which was identified via death records and physician diagnoses.
If caffeine has enough of an effect to change a diagnosis or death record, that seems worth reporting in any case.
And while it might be worthwhile to see if other stimulants have a similar effect, does it affect these results one way or the other?
That is not new, caffeine is an analog of ATP and known to affect serum cholesterol levels in the liver. Welcome to 1996.
Epidemiology is a fucking joke. We waste millions on studies making the same observations over and over then the media treats this like it's profound and new.
How many studies do we need to show obesity makes every disease worse or more prevalent?
How the fuck did they even control this study? Most people consume caffeine in one way or another. The one exception is Mormons, who actually have less disease than the typical population so this 💩 can seriously fuck off and stop wasting money.
Maybe 100% of the positive-caffine-outcome people also snorted 100mg of adderall every morning?
Exactly. Stimulants improve test scores, which is why most students are on adderol one way or another.