Giving Up Coffee?

For many of us, a day without coffee isn’t a good day, but if you find yourself often feeling anxious, jittery or suffering from digestive distress, it might be time to press pause on your regular cup and try something else instead. Here are three alternatives we rate.

It may look a little like coffee in your cup, but that’s where the similarities between coffee and dandelion coffee end. That doesn’t mean to say it can’t replace your daily cup, though. Made from the roasted root of the dandelion plant, dandelion coffee is a viable alternative to caffeine that has plenty of interesting benefits. As well as being a rich source of many important vitamins and minerals including beta-carotene, magnesium, calcium, iron and zinc it’s also been shown to support blood sugar regulation, which is great if you often need a coffee to help you out of your post-prandial slump. It’s also an anti-inflammatory and helps enhance the body’s natural detoxification processes and restore proper liver function. Although there are no reported side effects, as with any herb (and coffee) don’t drink it to excess.

If you only ever drink an occasional cup of herbal tea when you’re trying to wind down for the night, take this as your cue to up the ante on your consumption. Herbal teas, such as peppermint, ginger and camomile are thought to help lower cortisol levels which help reduce stress. They’re also reported to increase certain neurotransmitters which help alleviate low mood, which is great if too much caffeine is starting to make you feel anxious. You’ll need a therapeutic dose of herbal tea to have any effect though, which means two teabags in your cup instead of one.

Matcha has been around for a while but has been steadily growing in popularity, and if you haven’t already tried it, now is the time to give it a go. Although it does contain caffeine, on average it contains far less than a cup of coffee (roughly around 70mg versus upwards of 100mg per serving), so if you are looking to reduce but not eliminate caffeine, this could be for you. Made from finely ground green tea leaves, matcha, unlike green tea that you brew, uses the whole leaf, meaning you get all the potent antioxidant benefits on offer. Research shows it can also reduce your risk of high blood pressure and aid a reduction in body fat.