Stimulants usually make you burn more energy, so they're fertile ground now that calories are cheap. Dietary energy has only been affordable for a couple of centuries, so there's not a lot of time to have evolved more wasteful bodies and minds.
Coffee may be good for your healthspan but addiction to caffeine is real and you lose the nootropic benefits if you hit it every day, as most coffee drinkers do. In fact, it's worse than this, because your brain performs worse before it gets its coffee, at which point a daily drinker will just arrive back to baseline performance. Not to mention the irritation, "don't talk to me before my coffee", etc. that other people have to deal with before you get your fix. Or the hit to your wallet whenever you purchase coffee from your local barista.
I want to be clear I'm not throwing shade on the other healthspan benefits of coffee that do come from daily drinking but pretending coffee is a free lunch is naive.
Before I switched to drinking coffee, I used to drink carbonated caffeinated beverages like Coke and Pepsi. Up to twelve per day. I'm convinced that is what gave me diabetes. So, I switched to Diet Coke. But then I learned about all the bad chemicals in Diet Coke and Coke Zero, so I switched to coffee.
I drank caffeinated coffee for a long time. Decades. Occasionally, I would get to a state where if I had too much coffee, I would get caffeine headaches. And if I didn't drink enough coffee, I would get caffeine headaches. And there was no gap between those two states. I'd have to completely decaffeinate for a while, before I could reset my system.
A few years ago, I switched to cold brew coffee, because it has about 70% less acid than hot brew. That was much better for my stomach.
Then about a year ago, I switched to decaf cold brew, because the caffeine was causing too many problems with my heart rate, and my four different blood pressure medications weren't able to keep me in a good enough state.
So, I stopped drinking coffee altogether. Now, it's just plain water. And I do feel a lot better. No heart rate problems, no excess acid, etc....
Just my experience. YMMV.
I love coffee, but noticed I get grumpy and feel a bit stiff in the joints if I drink more than one cup a day, and sometimes I alternate with tea. That's all I really need to determine what works for me. I highly recommend when conflicting media reports are everywhere to start evaluating your background like that to create calm (if you can do so of course) or simply to embrace your mortality and realize that pollution and other factors make everyone's future quite unpredictable regardless.
I found out that I am sometimes allergic to citric acid, which turns out is made from mold. If I have more than one citrus flavor drink I get sore joints. Theoretically the mold is filtered in the final product but I suspect this is not always done well. I just avoid it now but dang its in everything.
Coffee supposedly has trace mold on it could be a similar problem.
Same as the citric acid problem I have. Supposedly it is filtered but turns out that is not always the case often enough that I find it is better to just avoid it altogether rather than feel bad all day.
