Coffee's health benefits aren't as straightforward as they seem:
You've probably heard it before: drinking coffee is good for your health. Studies have shown that drinking a moderate amount of coffee is associated with many health benefits, including a lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease. But while these associations have been demonstrated many times, they don't actually prove that coffee reduces disease risk. In fact, proving that coffee is good for your health is complicated.
While it's suggested that consuming three to five cups of coffee a day will provide optimal health benefits, it's not quite that straightforward. Coffee is chemically complex, containing many components that can affect your health in different ways.
While caffeine is the most well-known compound in coffee, there is more to coffee than caffeine. Here are a few of the other compounds found in coffee that might affect your health.
Alkaloids. Aside from caffeine, trigonelline is another important alkaloid found in coffee. Trigonelline is less researched than caffeine, but research suggests that it may have health benefits, such as reducing the risk of type 2 diabetes.
Polyphenols. Some research shows that these compounds, which are found in many plants, including cocoa and blueberries, are good for your heart and blood vessels, and may help to prevent neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's. Coffee predominantly contains a class of polyphenols called chlorogenic acids.
Diterpenes. Coffee contains two types of diterpenes – cafestol and kahweol – that make up coffee oil, the natural fatty substance released from coffee during brewing. Diterpenes may increase the risk of cardiovascular disease.
Melanoidins. These compounds, which are produced at high temperatures during the roasting process, give roasted coffee its color and provide the characteristic flavor and aroma of coffee. They may also have a prebiotic effect, meaning they increase the amount of beneficial bacteria in your gut, which is important for overall health.
The way your coffee is grown, brewed and served can all affect the compounds your coffee contains and hence the health benefits you might see.
Journal References:
1.) Trine Ranheim, Bente Halvorsen. Coffee consumption and human health – beneficial or detrimental? – Mechanisms for effects of coffee consumption on different risk factors for cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes mellitus, Molecular Nutrition & Food Research (DOI: 10.1002/mnfr.200400109)
2.) Rose C. Borrelli, Vincenzo Fogliano. Bread crust melanoidins as potential prebiotic ingredients, Molecular Nutrition & Food Research (DOI: 10.1002/mnfr.200500011)
E. Koen Bekedam, Mirjam J. Loots, Henk A. Schols, et al. Roasting Effects on Formation Mechanisms of Coffee Brew Melanoidins, (DOI: 10.1021/jf800999a)
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"In this large, observational study, ground, instant and decaffeinated coffee were associated with equivalent reductions in the incidence of cardiovascular disease and death from cardiovascular disease or any cause," said study author Professor Peter Kistler of the Baker Heart and Diabetes Research Institute, Melbourne, Australia. "The results suggest that mild to moderate intake of ground, instant and decaffeinated coffee should be considered part of a healthy lifestyle."
There is little information on the impact of different coffee preparations on heart health and survival. This study examined the associations between types of coffee and incident arrhythmias, cardiovascular disease and death using data from the UK Biobank, which recruited adults between 40 and 69 years of age. Cardiovascular disease was comprised of coronary heart disease, congestive heart failure and ischaemic stroke.
[...] A total of 27,809 (6.2%) participants died during follow up. All types of coffee were linked with a reduction in death from any cause. The greatest risk reduction seen with two to three cups per day, which compared to no coffee drinking was associated with a 14%, 27% and 11% lower likelihood of death for decaffeinated, ground, and instant preparations, respectively.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 29 2021, @03:15AM
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(Score: 4, Informative) by Thexalon on Wednesday December 29 2021, @04:49AM (11 children)
I get the impression there are people out there breathlessly following the latest in nutrition research to decide to eat the perfectly healthy meals. But so far, I haven't gone wrong in assuming "X is a superfood!" articles are the direct result of a marketing spend by the industry association for selling X, whatever X is, and as such should ignored.
Because the research that's not the result of those kinds of funding largely can be summarized as: Eat real food, not junk food, and not too much of it so you don't get fatter, and something else will kill you before your food does. You probably learned what constituted "real food" from your parents when you were a small child: Fruits, vegetables, lean meat, beans, maybe some cheese and bread thrown in, basically pick any cuisine that's been around for centuries and enjoy unless your doctor has specifically advised you to do something else.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by Barenflimski on Wednesday December 29 2021, @06:50AM
I think your impression is right on.
I know people that will take these sort of articles so seriously that they will modify their diets based on the latest pre-print articles about ingesting anything "healthy" and "non-healthy."
I'm not sure what you even call it, other than really short sighted. Of course if you ask them, they'll tell you that I just don't care and am obtuse and that because of that, my opinions don't add anything to the conversation. That effectively excludes me from the conversation because to them, anything I have to say, is "completely missing the point."
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 29 2021, @07:25AM
Quinoa, or whatever today's fad is, *is* real food - eaten for millennia just not by your old world ancestors (assuming...)
But the rest of your post about avoiding processed foods, sure.
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Wednesday December 29 2021, @08:03AM (3 children)
It sounds like you know Michael Pollan [wikipedia.org] without actually knowing him. Some of what you wrote sounds like his famous quote passed through a game of telephone: "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants". In particular the first part, what constitutes "food" is critical. I think it has to be something they would have recognized 100+ years ago as food, so roast beef in moderation is OK; but pop-tarts are probably not.
As for his whole body of work, I'm not equipped to criticize it in any meaningful way; but that quote seems to make good common sense.
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(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday December 29 2021, @01:34PM (2 children)
I've read some of his stuff, yes, although that's not the only source for those ideas.
And that's why I went with "pick any cuisine that's been around for centuries": There's lots of variety, and the test of time means that it's probably not the result of modern industry making heavily processed crap that you know full well is bad for you.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 29 2021, @03:38PM (1 child)
and probably some fruit with that salted beef and hard tack, proves not all oler advice is good advice.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 29 2021, @09:20PM
People ate what they had. If you are on an eighteenth century ship, your options of food that will keep on a voyage were limited. Similar if you lived in 19th century New England. Yet, the people back then were active and not lard balls like today, despite our access to "healthier" food.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 29 2021, @10:56PM (2 children)
That's what your parents taught you, but that's not what their parents taught them. For the grandparents (the generation getting into the 100s compared to your parents dying in their 80s and you by 75). Their primary foods were eggs, bacon/pork, red meat, and fish. Toss in some non-modernized, sweetened fruits when they're in season and add in bread made from tallow. The veggies and potatoes go in the stew pot. They couldn't get a wide range of vegetables year round like we can today. They could only get what could be grown locally or shipped across the rails and that was animals which were then butchered locally.
The problem with most of the food studies is they don't look at other things. They only look at the intake of that one item and proclaim whatever they want from that. They don't look to see if switching to coffee causes people to drink less sugary drinks, if people socially drink coffee and not other things (good social network has benefits), etc... You can change your data set and get any benefit you want out of any single item. So they pick (accidentally or not) the data set which indicates the benefits they want to see then they work backwards from those benefits to analyze the food trying to figure out what in the food might provide that benefit. This is backwards and results in bad outcomes (see all the issues from SSRIs compared with better outcomes from taking magnesium for two weeks. SSRIs were developed backwards too). As an example see all the hipe around anti-inflammatory food. Do you know what's better than eating something for it's anti-inflammatory properties? Answer: Not eating the things causing the inflammation! The modern food/industry/health industries are crazy. Replace anti-inflammatory with poison if you're not understanding it. The common media tells you that it's okay to eat more poison because we found something with might be an antidote for that poison. So eat lots of poison and take this maybe-antidote and you'll be good. There are lots of real poison in the world and there are real antidotes for those poisons. Yet no one goes around injecting real poison and believes it's a safe thing to do because they have an antidote nearby. But that's exactly how we treat our food. Eat these bad things for you then munch on XYZ to perhaps counter those bad things. Well, actually we're not going to research what those bad things are but instead will only research potential counters, so take all the poisons without telling us which ones you took and we'll look into which antidotes we can give you that'll suppress your symptoms. That way you can eat poison and not feel ill until a couple years before you drop dead 30 years early. Yay!
I suggest you opt out from all modern health/food/nutrition advice and look into things yourself if you care about your health. Focus on root causes of things and not on how to mask a symptom. Instead fix the thing causing the symptom.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday December 30 2021, @03:40AM (1 child)
Nice try, but you've demonstrated a perfect example of survivorship bias. Life expectancy in the US has gone upwards [berkeley.edu] quite steadily over the last century, not downwards.
You're definitely wrong in a lot of ways about this:
1. Meats and eggs and dairy have seasonality to them too. For instance, chickens don't generally lay eggs in the winter, or at least the ones I've raised don't. Cows are less productive as well on hay rather than grass. Fish lifecycles mean that different fish are available in different environments at different times. And if you're going to slaughter an animal for meat, it makes sense to do it in the late fall / early winter, so you've fattened it up as much as you can over the summer and you don't have to feed it through the winter.
2. Breads were a well-established centuries before the 1920's. And tallow was not an essential ingredient, at all: In some environments, it had been regulated to include only flour, water, salt, and yeast (possibly in barm form). Flour stores easily long-term and was widely available as an ingredient wherever wheat was grown in significant quantities.
3. It's true you didn't generally eat the same veggies year-round unless you were rich. What you did was eat different veggies at different times of year: Spinach and lettuce comes in early, peas and beans a bit later, squashes after that, and towards the end of fall you take in the root vegetables you'd rely on until your early plantings came in again. And there are a few outliers like kale that can manage to stay alive outdoors in winter and were valued supplements. But there was no time of the year where veggies weren't on the menu if you managed things well. As for fresh fruit, if you managed things well it was available for about half the year.
4. Food preservation was a thing people did quite a bit of. Drying, salting, canning, and winter refrigeration have all been in widespread use for centuries. Obviously, that would change the flavors a bit, but the historical recipes for using those were written to take that into account.
5. For much of human history, in a lot of places, meat was common for rich people but a rare treat for everyone else. This was enforced by law, e.g. any British peasant caught eating venison was risking being busted for poaching.
TL;DR: I'm not convinced you have more than the vaguest of clues of what you're talking about.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by wisnoskij on Thursday December 30 2021, @05:42PM
We were hunter gatherers for MILLIONS of years, agriculture and expensive meat were like a couple thousand year period. Under 1 percent of your ancestors lived during agricultural peasants times, And the non-peasant DNA from those periods that ate all the meat is probably 50% of our DNA from that period anyways.
The fact that you have the ability to out think not only grass but a deer is proof that the vast, vast, vast majority of your ancestors subsisted on meat not wheat.
(Score: 2) by wisnoskij on Thursday December 30 2021, @04:55PM (1 child)
Not that I disagree, but I cannot tell if you think coffee is real food or not.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Thursday December 30 2021, @05:57PM
The coffee itself would generally fall under "real food", especially if it's prepped Ethiopian style. The stuff lots of people put in it is a different story entirely: Non-dairy creamer, flavor syrups, etc often aren't.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 29 2021, @06:03AM
Whatever happened to just drink it cause you like the taste?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by sonamchauhan on Wednesday December 29 2021, @06:19AM (7 children)
Coffee contains Acrylamide, a carcinogen.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=coffee+acrylamide&ia=web [duckduckgo.com]
'Wet process's coffee is apparently safer and better.
https://coffee.fandom.com/wiki/Wet_process [fandom.com]
(Score: 3, Touché) by istartedi on Wednesday December 29 2021, @08:14AM (6 children)
Apparently it's in a lot of other things too [healthline.com]. I'm not worried. Is this why California started putting Prop-65 warnings up in coffee shops? Maybe they should do that in bakeries too... if they don't already, or maybe they just need to re-think that whole thing. "Welcome to California. This state contains chemicals known to cause cancer".
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by cykros on Wednesday December 29 2021, @05:21PM
Being in CA has been known to increase exposure to warnings known to increase anxiety, a condition associated with all manner of negative health conditions.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday December 29 2021, @07:17PM (3 children)
Gotta love how you are more concerned with the labeling requirements than the known carcinogens in those products!
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Thursday December 30 2021, @05:29AM (1 child)
Sarcasm is notoriously difficult to convey on the Internet, and I'm not sure if parent needs that pointed out or if I need to consider it when reading parent.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 30 2021, @09:11AM
<sarcasm>I agree, it's very difficult to convey sarcasm here at SN.</sarcasm>
(Score: 2) by wisnoskij on Thursday December 30 2021, @05:02PM
Well if we want to get technical here, anxiety is provably more medically dangerous than some of the things Californians put warning labels on. I suspect none of the autocrats that wrote the warning label laws considered the number of years a warning label could shear off of a persons life.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by sonamchauhan on Wednesday December 29 2021, @10:12PM
Yes, it's in most baked, fried or toasted foods. Acrylamide formation is suppressed by moisture, and certain herbs like rosemary. So anything boiled, like a soup, won't have it.
Stands to reason a guy who consumes healthy hot soups throughout life is gonna have better health than someone subsisting on cookies, fried and burnt toast.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 29 2021, @03:02PM
Yes that green site https://news.slashdot.org/story/21/10/20/1816255/eco-friendly-lab-grown-coffee-is-on-the-way-but-it-comes-with-a-catch [slashdot.org]