How Long Before Bedtime Should I Have My Last Coffee?
Posted on 25 Aug, 2019
Each day, coffee saves many a student, defibrillates working adults and resurrects depleted parents. But coffees’ most valued attribute as a picker upper can morph into a nightmare, especially when it’s bedtime and you discover you’re too wound up to wind down.
But how long does coffee eddy in your system? It’s different for everyone. Some can go from chatty to comatose right after coffee. Some end up being the host of an all-night sheep-counting soiree. For the average healthy person, it takes 5.7 hours for caffeine to reach its half life. Which means, if you drank 200 mg at noon, you’d still have 100 mg in your blood at 6 pm.
Understanding CYP1A2
CYP1A2 may sound the offspring of C3P0 and R2D2, but it’s not. It’s actually the gene required by the liver to demethylate caffeine molecules. Simply explained, it transforms caffeine into other substances, chiefly paraxanthine, which is ultimately excreted in the urine. More simply explained, it turns caffeine into pee.
The speed with which caffeine is cleared from the body is proportional to the amount of available CYP1A2 in a person. And this changes based on genetic disposition, substances in your body at the time and your overall physical condition.
Things That Prolong Caffeine Half Life
Oral Contraceptives
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Grapefruit Juice
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Pregnancy
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Being Asian
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Liver Disease
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Alcohol
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Coffee With Milk
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Things That Speed Up Caffeine Disposal
Smoking
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Broccoli
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Before caffeine can be flushed from the system, it needs to be broken down. This process doesn’t happen all at once, but at an exponential rate. Half life is perhaps the most common measurement for the decay of an entity.
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