When it comes to drinking coffee, having too much too late is just part of the game. If you haven’t irresponsibly consumed one too many cups as part of a mid-afternoon gambit to stay awake, have you really ever even had coffee? Were it not for the valleys we wouldn’t truly know how high are the peaks.
Not being able to shut down at night because you’re still jazzed on caffeine is never fun. But there may just be a cure: broccoli. A head of the green stuff may quiet a head full of the ‘feine stuff.
It may sound bizarre, but there’s some scientific backing to support it. According to Longevity, restlessness at night can be caused by caffeine lingering in your system, with roughly 50% of a coffee consumed at 2:00pm still working its way through your body some eight hours later. So instead of limiting your caffeine intake after 11:00am (because what sort of monster would even suggest such a thing), alternate remedies have been found.
One of them is broccoli. Turns out, eating broccoli helps your body metabolize caffeine faster, allowing it to works its way through your system before bedtime. Per a 2007 study in the journal Current Drug Metabolism, broccoli induces cytochrome P450 enzymes in the liver, which help in the metabolizing of caffeine molecules.
Now, just how much broccoli are you going to need to eat in order to tamp down the caffeine jitters? A non-trivial amount, to put it lightly. Per the study, participants consumed a diet of 500g of broccoli for six days before being given a 100mg caffeine tablet on the seventh. So, it may take something like a pound of broccoli in order to see what the study calls a “significant” impact.
But if broccoli isn’t your thing, a more recent study found similar results for all cruciferous veggies, including cauliflower, brussels sprouts, horseradish, broccolini, kohlrabi, mustard greens, bok choy, cabbage, kale, turnips, rutabaga, arugula, radish, daikon, and wasabi, amongst others.
What I really want to know is: will eating broccoli help with all of caffeine’s effects? Like, drinking coffee past noon makes me very sleepy, will gnawing on a head of broccoli help me from getting so drowsy? So eat your veggies, kids. You can drink all the coffee you want if you eat your veggies.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
