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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday May 14 2020, @06:10PM   Printer-friendly
from the Coffee:-it-calms-you-down-as-it-picks-you-up! dept.

Excess coffee consumption a culprit for poor health

Cappuccino, latte or short black, coffee is one of the most commonly consumed drinks in the world. But whether it’s good or bad for your health can be clarified by genetics, as a world-first study from the University of South Australia’s Australian Centre for Precision Health shows that excess coffee consumption can cause poor health.

Using data from over 300,000 participants in the UK Biobank, researchers examined connections between genetically instrumented habitual coffee consumption and a full range of diseases, finding that too much coffee can increase the risk of osteoarthritis, arthropathy (joint disease) and obesity.

In earlier research conducted by Professor Hyppönen and team, six cups of coffee a day were considered the upper limit of safe consumption.

Expert genetic epidemiologist, UniSA’s Professor Elina Hyppönen, says understanding any risks associated with habitual coffee intakes could have very large implications for population health.

[...] “In this study, we used a genetic approach – called MR-PheWAS analysis – to establish the true effects of coffee consumption against 1117 clinical conditions.

“Reassuringly, our results suggest that, moderate coffee drinking is mostly safe.

“But it also showed that habitual coffee consumption increased the risks of three diseases: osteoarthritis, arthropathy and obesity, which can cause significant pain and suffering for individuals with these conditions.”

[...] “For people with a family history of osteoarthritis or arthritis, or for those who are worried about developing these conditions, these results should act as a cautionary message.

[...] “While these results are in many ways reassuring in terms of general coffee consumption, the message we should always remember is consume coffee in moderation – that’s the best bet to enjoy your coffee and good health too.”

Journal Reference:
Konstance Nicolopoulos, Anwar Mulugeta, Ang Zhou, Elina Hyppönen. Association between habitual coffee consumption and multiple disease outcomes: A Mendelian randomisation phenome-wide association study in the UK Biobank. Clinical Nutrition, 2020; DOI: 10.1016/j.clnu.2020.03.009


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  • (Score: 2) by bradley13 on Friday May 15 2020, @08:04AM (1 child)

    by bradley13 (3053) on Friday May 15 2020, @08:04AM (#994564) Homepage Journal

    As soon as I read that there is a link between coffee and obesity, the alarms go off: This likely has nothing to do with causation and everything to do with p-hacking. "P-hacking", for those unfamiliar with the term, is "pretend" research. If you take enough random data, you will - purely randomly - find apparent correlations in that data. These correlations may or may not actually exist. You may flip a coin and randomly get "heads" 5 times - that doesn't mean that the coin is biased. If you try often enough, you *will* get a weird result eventually.

    So I actually looked at TFA (such as it is - it's just a press release), and also at the linked paper discussing their "PheWAS" technique. The PheWAS technique is basically p-hacking of the genome: looking for possible correlations between genes associated with obesity and a bunch of other diseases. PheWAS is defined as "hypothesis-free, data-driven phenome-wide association study", which is the very definition of p-hacking. As a first step, it's not the dumbest thing to do, but after you find a possible correlation, you then need to prove that the correlation actually exists, and as a further step you need to prove causality. Their study does neither of these things.

    Anyway, TFA takes this a step farther, and makes it a step less direct. They compared coffee consumption to 1117 conditions, and found correlations with three of them. More p-hacking, and again TFA assumes both that the correlation is valid, and that the correlation indicates causation.

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  • (Score: 2) by Aighearach on Friday May 15 2020, @10:11PM

    by Aighearach (2621) on Friday May 15 2020, @10:11PM (#994788)

    They've been trying so hard for so long to prove their generalized theory that since people enjoy coffee and caffeine is a "drug," therefore coffee consumption must be bad for you that if it was true they'd have strong evidence by now.

    P-hacking is the only way to get anything. They already have huge studies around the world that failed to find anything, it would be very surprising to find anything big. It has to be nothing just to be consistent with other studies.