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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: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 15 2020, @09:35AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 15 2020, @09:35AM (#994572)

    I can think of at least two major problems with meta studies:

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    1) Sampling issues. GMOs are a good example on this one. There's one meta-study that Monsanto loves to reference. It 'proves' that their genetically engineered crops increased yields. However, the study was dominated by studies in places such as the Philippines. And in those studies what would happen is they'd go to some farmer using archaic technology and hook him up with extensive farming tech, including their seeds and herbicides. Predictably the farmer would see increased yields (largely due to less crop losses).

    Yet when you do the same thing in developed European nations, where they were farming non-GMOs yet using modern farming tech, there was not only no growth in yields after swapping to genetically modified seed - but there was actually a slight decrease. Anyhow, the point of this being that 'This meta-analysis over [x] studies demonstrates our seed increase yields by [y]% on average! But it was a complete lie.

    I'd also elaborate a bit further here in that it's not just them cherry picking samples. Because once it was shown that yields didn't increase for farmers using contemporary farming technology, they simply stopped carrying out studies along these lines. And so even if you look at the whole of all scientific literature on the topic - you'd see an increase in yields. But it doesn't mean what such a meta-study would lead you to think it means.

    ---

    2) The masses aren't necessarily wise. Carry out a meta-analysis on astronomical works about the time of Galileo and you'd find 100% of astronomers confirming that the Earth is the center of the universe. Of course we'd like to imagine things have changed now a days but it was none other than Max Planck that "Science advances one funeral at a time." Meta-studies can help correct for issues of variance, but they cannot help correct when a prevailing (and ostensibly supported) view ends up being simply wrong. And on the contrary, they can provide not necessarily deserved weight to bad ideas.

    We'd like to imagine science advances along the lines of Einstein's relativity which, in very short order, replaced aether theory simply because it fit the universe much more aptly. But that was a monumental exception. Science, like everything, tends to be very inertial. Meta-studies often only serve to strengthen that inertia which is, at best, counter productive.

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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 15 2020, @03:53PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 15 2020, @03:53PM (#994665)
    You're having a great deal of fun punching the straw man there... In Galileo's day almost no one else was doing science as we understand it today. The "scientists" back them were basically philosophers and most of them didn't even believe that it was necessary to check one's ideas by experiment or observation. That sort of empirical testing of ideas actually wasn't done systematically until at least the middle of the nineteenth century. Now, scientists have to obtain scientific evidence by experiment and observation, and if a lot of them come up with similar evidence such that aggregating them together with statistical methods points in one direction, then there has to also be some very good counter-evidence in the other direction to refute that if it really is so wrong. And in the history of science, that only very rarely happens. When great scientific ideas do fall, they do so from many grievous wounds followed by a rethinking of the whole picture, and this is generally how science actually progresses.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 16 2020, @02:41PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 16 2020, @02:41PM (#994999)

      That's just not really accurate. Look at the particular bit of 'scientific research' we are currently discussing.

      As I said we'd like to imagine that modern science has evolved substantially, and there's no doubt that the topics have become substantially more complex. However, I think the methodology and mechanisms for science today are not only abysmal but getting worse by the day. The reason is explained by this very study. It, almost certainly intentionally, mixed very different groups (sugary sweet coffee flavored drink drinkers + coffee drinkers) into one sample and claimed it was homogeneous ("coffee drinkers"). By making this "mistake" they are able to create a shocking and "relevant" study which gets published, gets headlines, get grants, and gets them on the way to tenure and so on. The ancillary issues in science such as these (grants, publishing, etc) have become more important in contemporary science than the actual science.

      And the reason for that is, in my opinion, we have far too many people pursuing postgraduate education. Its turning what was once a field of relative exclusivity into just one dog pile of noise. And, like in many things, it turns out that the best way to ensure you make it in the game is simply to fake it.

      I'd also add that the social sciences itself tends to operate in a fashion almost entirely contrary to the scientific method. The reason is that you can't really perform meaningful science or studies on a social scale. And so you're left to perform toy studies, and these toy studies rarely show anything other than what they show. If that's not clear I mean just because people in a toy study happen to engage in 'x' behavior within that study, it doesn't necessarily extrapolate outwards to society - let alone to varying societies across different times. And so the social sciences end up being very much akin to astrology. They take a correlation and make mostly unfalsifiable claims to explain it, while demonstrating the validity of their explanation with things that are, at best, tangentially related to the initial issue. And that's with good behavior. Social science also tends to have vast numbers of people "faking it" as well thus leading to things such as the replication crisis where only 25% of social psychology studies from one of the most premier journals could be successfully replicated.