Comment · Fri, April 3, 2015 · Ceretropic
A word on caffeine + l-theanine
Original post in this thread
AoE-Priest · 60 points
I know this is like the most popular combo around here, but I like to stay skeptical and avoid falling into groupthink.
So, I was looking at the research index in the side bar. There are a number of studies posted for l-theanine. Unfortunately, most of these studies look at l-theanine+caffeine vs placebo. They do not compare l-theanine+caffeine vs caffeine alone. So basically you can't tell with these studies if the effect is coming from the caffeine or if l-theanine is having some contribution. (we already know that caffeine is a nootropic, so these results are not impressive) The ones that do this comparison don't have the most impressive results for l-theanine. Overall, I was fairly unimpressed by the quality of evidence for the efficacy of l-theanine.
I did find a recent meta-analysis on l-theanine/caffeine. (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24946991). It was not very well written unfortunately. I read the full article (the abstract is fairly misleading I found) and once again, they did not do a good job, I don't think, in trying to assess whether l-theanine was synergestic with caffeine, for the most part they looked at the two in combination without really doing a go…
What they were answering
Awholez · 1 points
This label gets abused a lot but do you have asperger's?
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb · Ceretropic
No, I am a very emotional person; sometimes too much. I have just learned how to turn the feelings off when I need to. That is kind of a left over trait from when I went through depression. However, I am very much a social person.