Coffee drinkers may be getting more than an energy boost. A Finnish study found that people who drank more coffee tended to have less total and abdominal fat, more muscle, and healthier metabolic markers despite having similar BMIs. Higher coffee intake was also linked to lower levels of certain amino acids associated with insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes risk.
You’re right, and unfortunately it’s also difficult to find a good quality coffee that’s Fair Trade too.
Theanine? What’s that do?
Indeed… Sounds like an unfilled niche, when you put it all together like that 🤔
Anyhoo. l-Theanine is one of the active ingredients in various teas, alongside caffeine, and complements the effects of caffeine while also offering neuroprotective effects. You’ll find it in coffee too, but only in trace amounts, where in tea it’s a lot closer to 1:1 (variable by botanical of course). Some light reading I happened across in my excursions:
And, this is a very long-term study - it’s more about the other compounds in coffee and tea than the caffeine and theanine, but it’s a good read and at least tangential to your question: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39772974/
There’s also this meta-study I found while I was looking for the first one, which shows the benefits differ somewhat based on physiology: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37523229/
I hope that answers the question 😂
Damn. That is the best response I could have asked for. Thanks!
Just FYI: all those studies are poorly controlled, underpowered and typical of the junk science around supplements.
Fair cop on some of it, but some I will defend, and the wider point holds. At supplement doses theanine alone has a narrow but consistent effect on reaction time; paired with caffeine it does more, across attention more broadly. Moderate effects, not miracle ones, but they replicate across independent meta-analyses, which is more than most of the supplement aisle can say.
Binning, and cheerfully:
And two of mine, while I’m at it:
Not binning:
Those links were what I’d happened across, not a curated evidence base, and I never claimed the list was exhaustive. A weak cite doesn’t kill a claim, it just means I grabbed badly off the shelf. The claims themselves hold up in much better-conducted work:
Also, “underpowered” is the wrong stick for two. The Saku cohort (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39772974/) is 1155 people followed about fifteen years, and Zhu 2024 (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37523229/) pools 33 studies and 389,505 participants. Their weakness is that they’re observational: food frequency questionnaires, healthy-user confounding, and pooling observational studies pools the confounding rather than cancelling it. Real problem, different problem, and I’d rather be criticised for the one I’ve actually got thank you very much.
The curling study (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10566444/) is n=22 but crossover, which brings more power per subject than the raw number suggests. Narrow population and sports nutrition has a publication bias issue, but it isn’t junk.
So. The acute attention effects at supplement doses are real, hold up across independent meta-analyses, and are stronger with caffeine than without. Sleep and relaxation effects are not as concrete as the marketing suggests. Neuroprotection is rodent focal-ischaemia models, and that class of result translates to humans badly (if there’s human evidence I haven’t found it). Worth being clear as well that the cohorts above don’t necessarily fill that gap: they measure tea and coffee drinking, not theanine intake, so anything they find could be catechins, chlorogenic acids, the sort of person who drinks green tea, etc.
It’s in tea. Its added to energy drinks cause it helps with the caffeine jitters. It helps smooth things out so you don’t feel like you’re having a panic attack like pre workout does to some ppl.