Slashdot Mirror
Optimizing Your Caffeine Intake With an App
MrSeb writes "Two doctors at Penn State University have developed Caffeine Zone, a free iOS app that tells you the perfect time to take a coffee break to maintain an optimal amount of caffeine in your blood — and, perhaps more importantly, it also tells you when to stop drinking tea and coffee, so that caffeine doesn't interrupt your sleep. By reading through lots of peer-reviewed studies, doctors Frank E. Ritter and Kuo-Chuan Yeh found that a caffeine level of between 200 and 400mg in your bloodstream provides optimal mental alertness, and that you should be below 100mg when you try to sleep. Caffeine Zone plots your caffeination level after you consume caffeine, and warns you if that big afternoon coffee will keep you up at night. It also lets you change the 'optimal' and 'sleep' values if you're particularly resistant or weak to caffeine."
Is there an Android version in the works? Or better yet, a desktop app that tells me time to get a cuppa?
Does it come with testing hardware so that it can determine precisely how strong your coffee is, and thus more accurately calculate your intake? Does it come with measuring tools to know how much you're pouring into your mug? How about accountability for the additional influence of sugar? What about people who have become desensitized to caffeine? There are too many factors they haven't considered, not least of which being how they're going to convince me to jam a needle in my liver so they can determine how well it's working.
No, it's because decaf inherently tastes bad.
Basically, when making coffee, the idea is to extract some chemicals from the coffee beans using hot water. Those chemicals are volatile organic compounds, for the most part. If you leave a coffee bean exposed to the air for a while (or a ground coffee bean exposed to the air for an hour), most of those chemicals will evaporate. The resulting coffee would taste terrible - much of what makes it taste like coffee would have evaporated.
Something similar happens with decaf. You have to try to extract the caffeine, without extracting the other compounds that make it taste like coffee. That's really difficult, because any process you might use to extract caffeine will extract other chemicals as well. Much of what makes it taste like coffee would be lost - you can take some decent coffee, decaffeinate it, and it'll end up tasting bad.
You can work around that by using much higher quality coffee beans - you take coffee that would taste really good, and it'd end up tasting OK. The problem with that is economics.
It turns out that people aren't willing to pay any extra for decaf compared to regular coffee. Since the decaffeination process itself adds cost, the only way to sell decaf for the same price as regular coffee is to use lower quality (cheaper) coffee beans. So now you're taking bad coffee, and making it worse. Aside from which, if you're producing coffee beans, why would you take the best you have and ruin it, when you could sell it as-is for a much higher price?
It is possible to have decaf coffee that doesn't taste like crap. It's just difficult.
The huge mugs that Americans favor and the super mega vente that most people buy at the coffee shop is way overkill. I found that coffee was making me edgy until a friend from Europe gave me a set of very nice small cups, maybe six ounces
Keep in mind that Europeans drink stronger coffee than Americans.
The recommended dosage for "ideal" coffee is 65-75 grams per liter in the US, and 75-90 grams per liter in Northern Europe.
Add that most Americans prefer their coffee weaker than recommended[*] - one scoop per cup is common, which translates to 4 scoops per quart, whereas in e.g. Norway, the recommendation is seven scoops per liter, plus "one for the kettle", or about 8 scoops per quart.
So chances are that your European friends get as much if not more caffeine from one small cup of coffee than what you'd get from a large 20 oz Starbucks.
[*] In part, I believe, because Americans drink more central and South American coffee high in organic acids, while Europeans drink more African coffee, higher in inorganic acids. With American roasts also being lighter and thus more acidic, it helps explain why the coffee is brewed weaker - few people would like to drink sour coffee. In comparison, a typical European coffee would taste less acidic but more bitter.