Coffee and Your Health: Part 3 Mental Performance and Exercise (RR17)

Welcome to the Coffee and Your Health series of the Roast and Reason podcast! Is coffee good for you or does it cause health problems? There is a lot of conventional wisdom out there about coffee and health that is just plain wrong. So in this series we will evaluate what the scientific research actually tells us. So lets find out if coffee just tastes good or if it is also good for us.

This episode will explore the effect of coffee on our mental performance and exercise. Caffeine is the main compound that we are talking about this week.

Coffee and caffeine cause chemical changes within the brain by changing several chemicals called neurotransmitters. The primary effect results from blocking adenosine receptors. This and several other changes that we will discuss cause the increased energy, alertness, and attention that we get from coffee. Turns out caffeine also improves our memory, learning, and mood.

Caffeine can also be thought of as a performance enhancing drug. Consuming coffee before workouts improves performance during both endurance and strength training. This episode will cover the mechanisms that causes this improve performance and propose a pre-exercise coffee protocol.