Coffee, coffee, coffee. You can’t live with it and some of us most definitely can’t live without it. For most of us, waking up and grabbing that first cup o’joe is essential. We literally can’t function without it, but the truth is that our dependency on coffee isn’t exactly helping our health. The main component in coffee that wakes us up and makes it so addictive is caffeine, also known as one of the most common stimulants in our lives (maybe following right behind sugar). But your susceptibility to coffee jitters after just one cup or your ability to toss back cups on cups of coffee each day and still feel like you need more may all be due to your genetics. Surprise, surprise, it can always be traced back to your genes!
So what exactly does drinking cups of coffee and copious amounts of caffeine do to your body? When you start to sip on that morning cuppa, it takes about 5 minutes for the caffeine to enter into your bloodstream. Once it reaches the central nervous system, your body takes the signal and tells the adrenals to go into overdrive and produce excess levels of adrenaline and cortisol, also know as the fight or flight and stress hormones. Evolutionarily, these hormones were extremely important and released in situations of life and death,but in our high-stress modern day lives our bodies have gotten into the habit of making these hormones all too frequently. When we drink coffee, we artificially create a life and death situation within out bodies that leads to unnecessary amounts of stress. Drinking coffee every day for years can cause prolonged exposure to these hormones and ultimately lead to various health issues such as digestive issues, anxiety, heartburn, raised blood pressure and even adrenal fatigue. Not to mention all of the withdrawal symptoms we can experience as a result of caffeine dependency such as fatigue, headaches and irritability. But some of us are more susceptible to the detrimental effects of coffee and caffeine than others.
There are three types of people in this world, the ones who pound cups of coffee to no effect, the ones who drink one cup and feel like they can’t stop shaking with all the energy in the world, and the ones who abstain from coffee entirely (we only wish we had your strength). Of the people who actually drink coffee, the two types can attribute their response to coffee to their ability to metabolize caffeine. The CYP1A2 gene, which we will lovingly call the coffee gene, is responsible for the production of an enzyme that aids in the metabolism of caffeine. For those of us with a fully functioning coffee gene, enzyme production is normal and caffeine is metabolized at a normalized or even above average rate. This means that you can drink coffee and not feel the strong effects of caffeine until a few cups in. However, when a single nucleotide mutation exists in the gene, enzyme activity is reduced significantly meaning that caffeine is metabolized at a slower rate and ultimately has a greater effect on the body for a prolonged amount of time.
Our abilities to metabolize caffeine should be taken with a grain of salt. While we may not all be able to test for the coffee gene and fully understand the productivity of our caffeine metabolizing enzymes, all we have to do to understand if we’re slow/average/fast metabolizers is listen to our bodies and its response to coffee. If you’re one of those people who feels super jittery and energized and uncomfortable after a single cup of coffee or you can’t drink coffee after 5 PM because you’ll be up all night, you likely have a coffee gene mutation and metabolize caffeine slowly. If you wake up a need three cups before you feel like you notice any of the wake up effects of coffee, odds are your coffee gene is fully functioning, you metabolize caffeine at an average rate, and you’ve even trained your body to respond to caffeine at a lowered rate.
The truth is, we should all cut back on the bean juice no matter our genetic ability to metabolize caffeine. If you metabolize caffeine slowly, your body feels more of those stress hormones with every cup, but even if you metabolize caffeine properly odds are you’re overdosing and causing unnecessary stress levels for prolonged periods of time. So what’s the answer? We’re not trying to tell you that coffee is the devil and you should never touch a cup of it again. On the contrary, having a cup from time to time may actually have some health benefits. What we’re trying to discourage is the dependency on coffee that so many of us find ourselves in. Genetically speaking, the coffee gene didn’t evolve with the purpose of helping us drink coffee, we simply overload it with that task. So, maybe try cutting back the caffeine for a week. If you feel like you’re massively hooked on the bean, transition to black tea or matcha lattes which have about a third of the amount of caffeine as a cup of coffee. If you feel like you’re strong enough, reach for yerba mate, roasted dandelion root, or even an anti-inflammatory turmeric latte for caffeine free alternatives. If you can survive a weak without coffee, your body will thank you, you’ll give your genes a break, and you might even end up feeling more energized in the long run!
