When I think of caffeine, the first thing that comes to my mind is not the fact that it is a dieting aid. In fact, I had not heard of this myth until the moment I sat down to do this assignment.

In the first source I read from the Healthline.com, Kris Gunnars talks thoroughly about how many tests have been done in order to prove if coffee helps with weight loss or not, specifically he touches on the increase of metabolism when it comes to drinking coffee. It is known by many that the higher your metabolic rate, the easier it is for you to lose weight. In the article, he talks about how caffeine can increase your resting metabolic rate by 3-11%, based on the amount of the dose. He backs up his statement by giving the source in which he found this information in. One of his sources is an article in the website PubMed.gov and it is about an experiment done by the Department of Human Nutrition of the Wageningen Agricultural University in the Netherlands. The experiment followed the procedure of giving two young healthy male volunteers 150 ml of decaffeinated coffee with or without 200mg of added caffeine. 3 hours after the caffeine consumption the metabolic rate had increased immediately and remained elevated for the 3 hours as the measurements were taken. The study was done twice.

When looking into the author of the article written in Healthline.com, I saw that Kris Gunnars is a writer for fitness and nutrition in The Epoch Time and he also has his own website called Authoritynutrition.com. There was only one article I found by a nutrition trying to discredit Kris Gunnars but it seemed as tho it was more an opinion then legitimate.

Source 1: https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/coffee-increase-metabolism#section3

In the second source, I found an article by nature.com and it was an experiment done by J A Greenberg, K V Axen, R Schnoll and C N Boozer. When researching about the authors of the article I found that they were all in Brooklyn College of the City University of New York most of them being in the department of health and nutrition sciences but C N Boozer is in the department of medicine.

A total of 7006 subjects aged 32-88 years old were tested to see if the consumption of coffee would lead to less risk of diabetes and in turn a weight loss. The results showed that the relationship between caffeine consumption and weight change all mattered in the situation and the amount of the dose.

Source 2: https://www.nature.com/articles/0802999

From my understanding after reading these articles I’ve come to the conclusion that caffeine can in fact help raise your metabolism, in turn making you lose weight. But perhaps that all depends on how frequent caffeine consumer you are because your body can get used to the effects of caffeine if it is consumed frequently, therefore, causing the metabolism not to go up anymore. So, in conclusion, if you are using caffeine as a weight loss tool you have to be precise with the amount you consume.