The Neuroscientists’ Way to Be More Bulletproof with Caffeine

August 1, 2012 · 18 comments

photo By Skley

When it comes to being Bulletproof, eating is only a small part of what you can do to perform better. You won’t find many Paleo bloggers who follow neuroscientists, but I consider neuroscience and psychology to be as important for personal performance as food. If you eat crap, you won’t perform. If you eat well but you think like crap, you won’t perform either.

That’s why I was pretty excited to come across neuroscientist Chris Chatham‘s piece titled, “Caffeine: A Users’s Guide to getting Optimally Wired.” Chris is one smart dude who really understand how the brain works and spent some time digging in on how to best use caffeine for mental performance. Business Insider even covered his write-up!

Here is what he says:
· Moderate doses of 20 to 200 mg of caffeine per hour provide the most optimal mental boost. ( About 1 cup of tea or 1/2 cup of coffee per hour)
· Long term consumption of caffeine is associated with several health benefits
· Use caffeine to work faster and harder doing things that are easy to start the team moving rather than solving challenging problems
· Caffeine can help you extend wakefulness, and may even be comparable to modafinil at 600 mg
· Don’t smoke (or use the patch or gum for mental performance) because nicotine speeds caffeine metabolism
· Hack absorption of caffeine by adding a little sugar or grapefruit with it.

The 1st four points make great sense. The final one though, is lacking. Anyone who’s tried Bulletproof coffee  knows that the best way to feel your coffee is to blend it with MCT oil and grass fed butter as explained here.  And grapefruit doesn’t just slow caffeine absorption; it blocks liver detox for all sorts of things (estrogen and cancer to start) as I’ve written here. You can have a little grapefruit every now and then but I wouldn’t do it daily.

So there you have it neuroscience recommends regular dosing, specific tasks, and hacked absorbtion rates.

Because Chris was writing about caffeine not coffee specifically, this piece doesn’t include the effects of things like histamine, a neurotransmitter that is found in most types of coffee. My upgraded coffee is designed to have the lowest levels of histamine and mycotoxins for better mental performance.

In fact, we are in the process of conducting a study in conjunction with Stanford University and Quantified-Mind to prove that upgraded coffee with butter has mental benefits apart from a typical mass-market dark roast with the toxins it contains. If you’d like to be a part of the study, sign up here. If you are one of the first 100 to complete the 8 day study, you may qualify for a free pack of upgraded coffee!

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  • Ryan

    I don’t drink coffee, is there a good substitute you’d recommend?

    Thanks!

    • MT_Dreams

      Good substitutes would be black tea or yerba mate. Though the same principles of coffee quality also apply to these as well. I usually use yerba mate that has not be smoked, as coffee gives me the jitters. Though not my cup of tea, you can take caffeine pills (if you don’t mind ingesting synthetic substances) which are probably quite cheap over the internet.

      • Dave Asprey

        Yerba yes, black tea no. (Black tea = mycotoxins)

      • JC

        Just something to be cautious of. I used to take caffeine pills all the time, now they keep me from falling asleep; even at lower doses and early in the day. I don’t like them anymore. Hate feeling like I’m dragging all the time but hate not being able to fall asleep even more. :)

    • Curt

      If you don’t want or need caffeine, rooibos or other non-black chai tea tastes fantastic with the butter and MCTs.

      • JC

        I don’t think Rooibos has any caffeine though.

  • Vince

    Does he have any thoughts on the thyroid/caffeine topic? I think you have talked about that before but I don’t remember your take. Maybe it is specifically coffee that is the issue and not caffeine but again, I don’t remember. From the cortisol aspect, it seems like as long as you are eating bulletproof then it won’t affect fat storage or if anything it will help (cortisol breaking down fat in low insulin state, etc.). Also, I think you had said something like “one cup of coffee a day is good, two is okay, three might be a problem”. 1/2 a cup every hour, that’s a lot of coffee compared to what you had indicated. Maybe he means 1/2 a cup during the hour you need to be more alert? Either way, I love any evidence that supports drinking more of that luscious bulletproof coffee or coffee in general.

  • Laura

    Not sure where to post this. I tried emailing a couple times… It’s very frusterating…

    But hopefully I can get a response here… I’ve been trying to order the bulletproof coffee for almost 2 weeks now and for some reason when I go to check out it does not allow me to process my order. I am not sure why?! Perhaps there is a malfunction on your site… Is there an alternative way to ordering the coffee by phone perhaps? Hopefully this problem can get resolved soon!

    • Dave Asprey

      Did you try out contact form? It’s monitored 24/7. Sorry this happened. We have a much improved shopping cart that has eliminated 99% of issues. (only one so far in a week!). I asked my customer service guy to reach out to you.

  • Jaicdii

    What’s the point in consuming coffee and getting histamine and all the other crap along with the caffeine when getting pure caffeine from ebay in bulk is so cheap?

    • Dave Asprey

      You are missing all the antioxidants and (importantly) the neurological anti-inflammatories in coffee.

  • http://DoingSPEED.com/ Matt

    For more reading, “The Caffeine Advantage: How to Sharpen Your Mind, Improve Your Physical Performance, and Achieve Your Goals–the Healthy Way” is a great book on the subject. Well-referenced and it seems to be unbiased.

  • http://www.facebook.com/krista.nenn Krista Nenn

    I am SO sensitive to caffeine, drinking coffee is a big no-no for me. My heart pounds and skips, I am shaky and panic stricken until it wears off. Ditto with black tea. Green tea only if it’s very weak. So is this about the coffee, or about the butter and MCT oil? I can and do take those in, b ut what benefits am I missing out on by not being able to tolerate caffeine?? And is this something that I can change?

    • Chris

      It wouldn’t surprise me if that’s the toxins rather than the caffeine. I had a bad batch the other week that I hadn’t realised had oxidised until I drank it and I had some jitters followed by some bad mental performance. I haven’t read enough yet to figure out what a problem like that might be, but I don’t think caffeine is the bad guy, just misunderstood.

  • Joey

    God I love this blog. way to crank out the high quality info dense posts one after another Dave. I love love the coffee…its opened a new world to me as i had officially given up on coffee. BP gives me an amazing steady energy and clarity without the inner shakiness/manic/speediness that other coffees have but i am still crashing into a bit of a weak jellyfish like state a few hours later, although the landing is definitely a much smoother one as opposed to other coffees. I am thinking that its not the coffee at all but more that my adrenals are just completely sapped after years of chronic stress… what can i do to beef up and support my adrenals? single mom, work full time, grad student, frantically trying for years to recover my kid from autism… pretty much depleted physically, emotionally, and financially! poor little adrenals are shriveled raisins at this point I would imagine… what can I do to bring them back to life?

    • cogrick2

      I’m also curious to hear Dave’s thoughts about restoring adrenal glands, or even assessing whether one’s health concerns are related to adrenal glad dysfunction.

      Joey, one idea I am trying today is not drinking the coffee until after 10 AM. I realized that I feel okay in the early morning once I shake the cobwebs out, so if I can endure the non-caffeinated state until later then I might avoid crashing. My energy flags by 11 AM and then boosts after 5 PM, so I need the BP coffee most in that period of time. I’ll still use some MCT oil and grassfed butter early in the morning though.

  • http://twitter.com/neurohedonia neurohedonia

    Since the search function only accepts search terms of 4 or more letters “MCT oil” is not returning any results. My question is about blending vegetable juice & MCT oil, which seems to result in butyric acid? I had been blending produce such as kale, arugula, cucumber, avocado and lemon in
    Vitamix with olive oil & protein powder. Stopped adding protein
    ahead of time when I heard you explain its rapid degradation, Dave, and also
    switched olive oil to MCT oil, but within a few hours in
    the fridge, the juice develops an awful, vomitous sort of butyric acid smell and taste that had never happened before with the juice, but it happened 3 batches in a row with the MCT oil, which is odorless and tasteless on its own. Do you know why that happens? I can do MCT and protein separately but wonder if there’s a
    workaround since part of the reason I make the juices is to have good sustenance on the road? Also gave substituting coconut oil for MCT a go, however it
    is not much better tasting after a while plus it’s a bit prone to solidifying.
    Thanks for any ideas.

  • http://twitter.com/baldeagle Allan Misner

    I guess the brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, well that was stupid, has me a bit stumped. Perhaps I should read the work myself, but using the 80/20 rule to sell an idea seems a bit weak.

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