So…coffee. The drink most people say starts their day off right. Most people drink regular, caffeinated coffee – the primary reason being that it elevates their mood and energy in the mornings. But for some of us, it’s against medical advice to drink too much caffeine (see my post about caffeine and teens for more information). So how does decaf coffee come into play? How do you actually “extract” the caffeine from coffee? And are there any harmful side effects to teens drinking decaf coffee? Because I, for one, happen to enjoy my morning coffee…without the caf. Like usual, I started off my research journey by watching a short video – and here’s a great one I found through Healthline:

Now, according to this video and this article, decaf coffee is just caffeinated coffee with the caffeine removed. There are a couple ways to remove the caf from coffee beans, with the majority of them including water, solvent, or carbon dioxide. These processes end up removing about 97% of caffeine from the coffee beans – leaving about 3mg per cup (with one study showing that from a 6oz cup of coffee, a range of 0-7mg of caffeine was found). But from my last caffeine post, we know that the maximum recommended caffeine intake for teens is 100 mg per day, so decaf coffee still fits well within this limit.

Are there any harmful side effects to drinking decaf coffee? According to Medical News Today, decaf coffee itself does not seem to pose any dangerous side effects. But the decaffeination process has the potential to be harmful. In a study done in 2017, it was found that using methylene chloride in the decaffeination process is potentially dangerous. Inhaling around 200 ppm (parts per million) of methylene chloride from the air (so a very small amount) has been shown to slow down someone’s central nervous system and impair their hand-eye coordination. As a result of this, the FDA has approved the methylene chloride extraction process in coffee so long as the final product contains less than 10 ppm of residual methylene chloride.

Lastly, is there a problem with teens drinking decaf coffee? This article from Johns Hopkins Medicine doesn’t suggest that there is. It does list recommended maximum caffeine intake per day for age groups, which I’ll include here:

• 4-6 Years – 45 mg (approx. 1/2 cup of caffeinated coffee)
• 7-9 Years – 62.5 mg
• 10-12 Years – 85 mg
• Teens – 85-100 mg

So yay! It seems to me that from this research, drinking decaf coffee isn’t harmful to teens (or when consumed in moderation, for younger children). Again, this is not medical advice and I am not a doctor. But I hope this article helped you learn something new!