Caffeine affects the immune system via at least two opposing mechanisms.
Mechanism 1: A2A receptor antagonism (immunostimulatory) Tumors and damaged tissues release adenosine, which engages the A2A receptor on immune cells and signals them to stand down. Caffeine antagonizes (i.e., blocks) this receptor.
Mechanism 2: Raising intracellular cAMP (immunosuppressive) Caffeine also inhibits phosphodiesterase, the enzyme that hydrolyzes (i.e., breaks down) cAMP. cAMP accumulates inside immune cells, which acts as a "calm down" signal.
Note: both mechanisms are dose-dependent. At dietary caffeine levels, A2A antagonism likely dominates, whereas PDE inhibition is weak and mainly relevant at higher concentrations. However, the net immune effect in the tumor microenvironment remains unproven.
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If you would like to learn more, I can outline a framework for technical folks to ease in and become more informed on cancer. Gaps abound. The more people who understand cancer, the faster we get to cures. Moreover, personalized cancer treatment is the obvious future. Knowledge acquired now may pay off later (but hopefully not needed).
It will be an "Cancer for Engineers" framework, delivered via free, open-source Custom GPTs and Claude Skills. (Gemini gems are less reliable in our experience.)
The goal: to ease engineers into cancer via AI personalized introductory curriculums with varying time commitments to enable deeper independent investigation or fast exits if interest wanes: 4 hours, 8 hours, 12 hours.
Basically 1-3 hours per week for a month.
The reason I think some engineers may find cancer interesting, aside from the societal impact:
The human body is like a complex operating system. Cancer is a severe runtime error. Tracing root causes -- like genetic mutations, signaling errors, or immune evasion -- has many parallels to diagnosing system failures.
BTW if anyone from Kaggle/GDM is reading this, we are having issues submitting a benchmark paper for NeurIPS based on the Kaggle Benchmark.
Google models seem to get a different scheduling priority, ironically, enough and take >20 hours to complete a benchmark task that other models like Opus 4.6 finish in <1 hour -- same code path, same task. Would love help if possible since the abstract deadline is Monday (It's last minute because we didn't originally plan to submit this, but someone suggested it.)
All you haters that give me grief for drinking my daily cup of decaf can shut up now.
https://i.imgur.com/aDt06Lg.png
I do find it amusing. But drink your decaf, brother, do what works for you.
Unfortunately it isn't without potential downsides.
That said, I do think there is some truth that decaf is lacking (including via supercritical CO2) and I wonder how long until we could have a product like genetically engineered coffee plants that produce everything except caffeine. I'd like that, though I can immediately see an issue with growing a plant without its natural pesticide.
Then why identify with it at all? You would be happier taking caffiene pills or drinking an Arnold Palmer, it sounds like.
It was ironic but interesting : dopamine is viewed as THE neurotransmitter of motivation while in fact it’s only one part of the mechanism. But it’s the part everyone is bragging about because it supports the idea that you can control your dopamine levels and be responsible of your own motivation.
The whole point of the argument was that your serotonin and noradrenaline levels were as much as important if not more, and, fat chance, you cannot buy serotonin or noradrenaline supplements. You have to be in mentally in a good place to get those right and that’s not something you have that much control over. Especially your noradrenaline levels are strongly tied to the quality of your environment and that’s why you should politically fight for a better life environment.
Coffee is not what defines your identity. It's fine to admit it isn't perfect.
There are far worse foods that spike your cholesterol, irrelevant point you've made
Not saying those things are necessarily good for you, I’m just saying we don’t seem to understand this stuff very well
If you compare Italians and Greeks to, say, Swedes and Dutchies, you'd get a much different picture.
[0] not entirely Americans their personal fault, their urban design isn't for walking around
Not just "sometimes". Less these days, but when they were recognized as blue zones decades ago almost everybody smoked like chimneys.
It's like trying to argue that running may have a negative effect on some people's meniscus under some specific circumstances. That doesn't negate the generalization "running is good for you".
Texas A&M also has a coffee research center dedicated to promoting and protecting global coffee trade and consumption so… yeah.
Do you have a source for this? Because it doesn't sound right to me. And also, I live in a coffee producing company, work adjacent to the coffee industry, and had a long conversation with someone planning to set up a business exporting green beans to the US, and their beans were getting tested to an extreme degree and being rejected for a few ppm over on certain things.
I have heard the 3% rule but fyi it's 1% in the EU and since there's actually not that many large scale decaffeination factories in the world, as far as I know they all target the EU level.
If you buy small batch, large batch, or somewhere in between it's probably been processed in one of these few large factories.
Not sure what the decaffeination process does, but it definitely does not preserve the taste of the "untouched" beans. Are my tastebuds too sensitive?
I didn’t dig in too deeply, but started drinking a morning cup of sugar free double mocha cappuccino, to help my workouts.
If I’m fooling myself, don’t tell me. I like the cappuccino.
We do, and that's called cancer;)
I did use pure nicotine and it was very bad for my health, probably due to high dosage, but still.
I've used heavy stimulants, benzos, opioids, dissociatives without an issue, but nicotine is in a class of its own in terms of how insidiously addictive it is.
But just from a health point of view: extreme arm and hand joint issues, forearm vascular issues that made my hands numb at night, palpitations/arrithmia like I was about to die when I used nicotine before sleep and I was drifting to sleep -- it really felt like I was about to die, like my heart was mangled up.
Some research indicates that nicotine can influence how existing cancer behaves and spreads, so that's worth considering.
