I have reason to believe that caffeine has a positive effect on my metabolism and thus on my weight loss.
What I’m struggling with is verifying this.
How can I test if caffeine really has that desired effect in my body and what doses do the trick?
Most commonly you would create an ABBA study design. “A” represents a time period (i.e. a month) where you have no caffeine (or a smaller dose) and “B” represents the time periods with a higher dose of caffeine. Then you compare the A periods to the B periods. The reason you have two A and two B periods is to correct for washouts periods. It is expected that some substances take some time to exit your body. By having two A periods both before and after - you can assess the degree of the washout period and correct for it. You would measure your weight between all four periods and then compare.
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i think it’s impossible to isolate effect…
You can try to read sample research in pubmed and replicate
I disagree with “impossible.” The ABBA test is a very good beginning. There of course might be some confounding influences, but one way to deal with these is to do a series of ABBA tests of varying lengths, and also a series at different dosages. A very strong effect may show up across different designs. If it doesn’t, well, you could have missed it, sure, but you are probably more interested in strong effects than weak effects, so if you show no effect across different designs you might accept “no” for an answer. If it shows up in just one design, then you have a clue to follow.
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