I know some of you are probably rolling your eyes already, but we need to have a real talk.
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I used to listen to Cole talk about how coffee and alcohol were both dangerous in his livestreams, nodding to myself but shrugging his advice off. I continued to drink coffee regularly, and drink alcohol on the weekends… but boy, was he right. It caught up to me finally.
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A few weeks ago I went on an alcohol and coffee binge after drinking the stuff routinely for about 2 months beforehand. I noticed almost overnight that my hair had started thinning. I got scared and went cold turkey off this stuff. Since then I’ve been dealing with caffeine withdrawls, even several weeks out I’m still feeling the effects of the caffeine as my body returns to homeostasis.
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What does alcohol/caffeine have to do with thinning hair you might ask? Human hair is the most visible thing about us. When hair starts to thin, fall out, grey prematurely, it’s a huge RED ALERT signal that something is not right inside the body. I did more digging and what I found shocked me.
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Both alcohol and coffee DESTROY your intestinal lining. The acidity combined with the sanitation effect of alcohol wrecks your stomach. It kills the microbiome, those little micro-organisms that break your food down and process the nutrients/minerals out of it, and it also prevents you from getting nutrition absorption from your food as the intestines get inflammed from the alcohol burn. You ever notice how alcoholics are always usually really skinny and they drink constantly? It’s because no matter how much food they eat, they can’t absorb nutrients from it because their system is so fucked up, so the food just passes through them.
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This is why my hair started thinning randomly after that alcohol/coffee binge. My body wasn’t getting the nutrients it needed to build healthy hair, and also the coffee was screwing up my adrenal system and stressing me out with heart palpitations and random almost panic-attack type of thoughts.
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Caffeine is the most addictive drug on the planet. It’s amazing that it doesn’t come with any warning labels like alcohol or tobacco do. Caffeine does NOT give you energy! What happens when you drink caffeine is, the receptors in your brain that normally tell you that you’re tired are being blocked by the drug. That’s it. That’s why when you drink caffeine, you have a crash later in the day because all those receptors open up again and your brain is FLOODED by tired signals from your body.
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Ever since I quit cold turkey, I noticed my hair is beginning to thicken up again. I also started taking biotine supplements, which is what your body uses to grow hair; along with protein intake. I feel so much better now, but I’m still dealing with caffeine withdrawl. Apparently it can take up to 3 months for your body to fully kick caffeine and return to its natural state. Does that sound like something humans should be consuming? Fuck no!
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And yes, this goes for tea as well. Tea has less caffeine than coffee, but it’s the same thing just in smaller doses. It also stains your teeth, just like coffee.
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STOP FUCKING DRINKING ALCOHOL AND CAFFEINE FATTY!!!!!!!!!
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It’s fucking junk, all of it. Kick it permanently, and Just drink regular water.
Alcohol throws you out of ketosis so I don’t drink. But that one cup of black coffee in the morning is my one thing I have left that I really enjoy. Other than that it’s snake juice and herbal tea here.
Coffee consumption is strongly associated with a reduction in mortality: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/life/health-wellness/2022/06/09/daily-coffee-can-increase-your-lifespan-new-research-says/7541812001/
Last year I noticed I was having heartburn for days at a time, when normally I wasn’t prone to it. I thought I’d eaten something that wasn’t agreeing with me. In what I thought was something unrelated, I was having chest pains at work. I work in a factory, and often lift pallets and heavy boxes. I thought I’d overdone it, or I maybe I was having a serious heart issue. I left for the emergency room and found out I had gerd.
While I don’t drink alcohol and am not a fan of orange juice or spicy foods, I did drink coffee and tea almost every shift. I didn’t know at the time that habitual caffeine intake can cause gerd.
I was told to avoid alcohol, orange juice, caffeine, chocolate, spicy foods, greasy foods and mint.
I got caffeine withdrawals pretty bad. It felt like a migraine had moved into my skull and settled down. It was hard to quit, but the chest pains actually scared me enough to quit.
Most alcoholics I’ve met are obese because alcohol has a lot of carbohydrates. It’s basically liquid bread.
Caffeine has a half life of 5-7 hours. Drink decaf or even full strength if you want but stop long before bedtime. My family stops before noon. Good book: Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker.
Too much of anything is bad for you. Too little of some things is not as good for you. There’s a concept in toxicology that I don’t remember the name of – a test mouse given a small exposure to a toxin has a shinier coat and better health than the control group (and also obviously than the test groups that receive more). This would depend on the substance’s properties and the dose thereof. I don’t know if coffee and alcohol would be a part of that, but I wouldn’t doubt it. At what dose? No idea. Book this information was learned from: The Dose Makes the Poison by Alice Ottoboni.
Even from an amateur perspective, it’s pretty bad science (and common sense) to lump two vastly different things into one category in this way. Is alcohol bad for you? Yes. That’s been proven pretty much time and time again. If you want more in depth research, go listen to Andrew Huberman’s podcast he did on it a week or so ago. But caffeine? Definitely not the same as alcohol. We can go back and forth and cherry pick studies that support our claims one way or the other, but it’s definitely in a different category than alcohol. Maybe you don’t respond well to it, but there’s millions (maybe billions) of people who not only have no issues with it, but actually benefit from it (e.g. increased productivity, increased thermogenesis, etc). There’s also something to be said about combining them together which very likely has even greater negative effects than consuming each one separately at different times. This is spreading a bad message filled with half-truths.