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Kicking The Caffeine Habit – Plant-Based Diet
My new Dandy Blend drink.
I started drinking coffee in university during my engineering days. I’m sure I needed the energy boost. But I really remember drinking coffee at work when I felt tired or needed to get away from the desk for a few minutes. I also found it to temporarily suppress my appetite. I always seem to be fighting hunger so it would help although I would add cream and sugar so I probably wasn’t doing myself any favours.
For the past few years I’ve been working from home and generally drinking 2 cups of coffee in the morning. I don’t do it for energy but it’s become a daily ritual over the past 25 years. In Canada it’s often cold but in the morning it’s nice to have a nice warm roasted drink of coffee.
There are some negative aspects to coffee such as more frequent urination, adrenal stimulation, acidity, and laxative effects, but also many benefits as mentioned by Dr. Greger in various videos – although he does recommend green tea instead. The fact that stopping a food has all these side effects might be a good indication that it’s not the best thing to drink! I also noticed that I don’t really like coffee on it’s own without adding non-dairy milk and sugar as it has a bitter flavour.
I’ll be honest, the idea of giving up coffee altogether was something I was very resistant to. I would focus on Dr. Greger’s videos as a way to justify it. But since I tend to trust doctors like Dr. McDougall and Dr. Esselstyn I decided to give it a try.
Because there can be side effects like headaches I decided to phase out the caffeine gradually. I use 6 small scoops of coffee when I brew it, so I start swapping in decaf for caffeinated coffee, I scoop at a time. I went from 5 caffeine and 1 decaf scoops for 2-3 days to eventually 2 caffeine and 4 decaf scoops. Each scoop reduction was a few days so a few days at 5, then 4, etc.
There were definitely some headaches – in the back of the head, tension type headaches along with some eye strain. My wife Bonnie also had issues so we took some Tylenol – we still have to function during the day, especially her studying Accounting at the moment.
When I got down to 2 scoops caffeinated to 4 scoops decaf I received my order of Dandy Blend from Amazon which I had heard good things about. Dandy Blend is a combination of ingredients such as roasted chicory, beets, barley, rye and dandelion roots. They say you don’t have any side effects but I can’t be sure as I had already scaled down to some extent.
Dandy Blend is very rich and has a roasted flavour like coffee. I just heated up a cup of water and added about 1.5 tsp of Dandy Blend. I also added some sweetened soy milk. Feel feel to vary things, different nut milks or none at all, add cinnamon or other spices, and adjust the amount of Dandy Blend to your strength preferences.
My recommendation would be to scale down the caffeine as I did but also drink a cup of Dandy Blend which they say helps with the withdrawal symptoms.
