Healthy drinks

Healthy drinks: common questions

The questions people actually arrive with, answered with figures read from this catalogue rather than rounded off.

Which drink should I have if I want to sleep tonight?

Caffeine has a half-life of roughly five to six hours in most adults, so a cup at 4pm still has about half its caffeine working at 10pm — and the half-life varies substantially between people. For a late drink the reliable answer is one of the 48 caffeine-free botanicals in this catalogue rather than a decaf, which is reduced but not free of caffeine.

Can a drink actually improve my health?

Not in the way the category usually implies. What this site does is describe mechanisms that have been studied, state when evidence is preliminary, and say plainly when a claim is traditional use rather than a trial result. No beverage here treats, prevents or cures anything, and where a widely repeated figure comes from a single small study, the page says so. Grouping drinks by what people reach for them to do is a browsing aid, not a medical claim.

How much caffeine is too much in a day?

Health authorities commonly cite up to 400 mg a day for most healthy adults, and around 200 mg during pregnancy — but individual sensitivity varies widely, and those figures are population guidance rather than a personal limit. What matters as much as the total is the timing: the same dose taken late affects sleep far more than it does at breakfast. Every drink page states its milligrams so the arithmetic is possible.