from the then-I-should-live-a-looooong-time dept.
"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.
Cardiovascular disease was diagnosed in 43,173 (9.6%) participants during follow up. All coffee subtypes were associated with a reduction in incident cardiovascular disease. [...]
An arrhythmia was diagnosed in 30,100 (6.7%) participants during follow up. Ground and instant coffee, but not decaffeinated, was associated with a reduction in arrhythmias including atrial fibrillation. [...]
Professor Kistler said: "Caffeine is the most well-known constituent in coffee, but the beverage contains more than 100 biologically active components. It is likely that the non-caffeinated compounds were responsible for the positive relationships observed between coffee drinking, cardiovascular disease and survival. Our findings indicate that drinking modest amounts of coffee of all types should not be discouraged but can be enjoyed as a heart healthy behaviour."
Journal Reference:
David Chieng, Rodrigo Canovas, Louise Segan, et al. The impact of coffee subtypes on incident cardiovascular disease, arrhythmias, and mortality: long-term outcomes from the UK Biobank [open]. Eur J Prev Cardiol. 2022. DOI: 10.1093/eurjpc/zwac189
Some previous stories:
New Research Finally Proves That Coffee is Safe During Pregnancy
Scientists Identify How Caffeine Reduces Bad Cholesterol
Coffee's Health Benefits Aren't as Straightforward as They Seem
Coffee May Reduce Risk of Death From Stroke and Heart Disease
Related Stories
Coffee may reduce risk of death from stroke and heart disease:
Drinking up to three cups of coffee a day may protect your heart, a new study finds.
Among people with no diagnosis of heart disease, regular coffee consumption of 0.5 to 3 cups of coffee a day was associated with a decreased risk of death from heart disease, stroke and early death from any cause when compared to non-coffee drinkers.
The study, presented Friday at the annual meeting of the European Society of Cardiology, examined the coffee drinking behavior of over 468,000 people who participate in the UK Biobank Study, which houses in-depth genetic and health information on more than a half a million Brits.
It's another home run for coffee consumption. Studies have found drinking moderate amounts of coffee can protect adults from type 2 diabetes, Parkinson's disease, liver disease, prostate cancer,Alzheimer's, computer back pain [PDF link] and more.
Journal References:
1). Bhupathiraju, Shilpa N, Pan, An, Malik, Vasanti S, et al. Caffeinated and caffeine-free beverages and risk of type 2 diabetes [open], The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (DOI: 10.3945/ajcn.112.048603)
2). Constance E. Ruhl. Coffee and Tea Consumption Are Associated With a Lower Incidence of Chronic Liver Disease in the United States, Gastroenterology (DOI: 10.1053/j.gastro.2005.08.056)
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.
Scientists identify how caffeine reduces bad cholesterol:
[...] Observations are one thing, but scientists hadn't identified many mechanisms for how compounds in coffee, particularly caffeine, might bestow these benefits. So for the new study, researchers at McMaster University investigated what might be behind caffeine's apparent knack for preventing cardiovascular disease.
The team found that regular caffeine consumption was linked to lower levels of a protein called PCSK9 in the bloodstream. Lower levels of this protein boosts the liver's ability to break down LDL cholesterol, the "bad" type that can block arteries and lead to cardiovascular disease. Not only did caffeine and derivatives of it work directly on PCSK9, but the researchers found that it also blocked the activation of another protein called SREBP2. This in turn also reduces levels of PCSK9 in the blood.
"These findings now provide the underlying mechanism by which caffeine and its derivatives can mitigate the levels of blood PCSK9 and thereby reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease," said Richard Austin, senior author of the study. "Given that SREBP2 is implicated in a host of cardiometabolic diseases, such as diabetes and fatty liver disease, mitigating its function has far reaching implications."
Of course, it's not as simple as guzzling coffee to stave off heart disease. Mixing it with cream or sugar (or a donut on the side) may cancel out any positive health effects – and that's especially true if your caffeine delivery method of choice is soft drinks or energy drinks. Too much caffeine can also be a bad thing, and scientists aren't yet settled on how much is too much. All up, if improving your heart health is the goal, there are probably far more direct methods you could take.
Journal Reference:
Paul F. Lebeau, Jae Hyun Byun, Khrystyna Platko, et al. Caffeine blocks SREBP2-induced hepatic PCSK9 expression to enhance LDLR-mediated cholesterol clearance [open], Nature Communications (DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-28240-9)
Genetic analysis of coffee drinking behavior by Drs. Gunn-Helen Moen, Daniel Hwang, and Caroline Brito Nunes from the University of Queensland's Institute for Molecular Bioscience revealed that limited coffee consumption during pregnancy did not increase the risk of miscarriage, stillbirth, or premature birth.
"Current World Health Organisation guidelines say pregnant women should drink less than 300mg of caffeine or two to three cups per day," Dr. Moen said.
"But that's based on observational studies where it's difficult to separate coffee drinking from other risk factors like smoking, alcohol, or poor diet. We wanted to find out if coffee alone really does increase the risk of adverse pregnancy outcomes, and the research shows this isn't the case."
Dr. Hwang said coffee-drinking behavior is partly due to genetics, with a specific set of genetic variants affecting how much coffee we drink.
"We showed that these genetic variants not only affect coffee consumption in the general population but also in pregnant women," he said.
[...] The researchers emphasize the study only looked at certain adverse pregnancy outcomes, and it is possible caffeine consumption could affect other important aspects of fetal development.
"For that reason, we don't recommend a high intake during pregnancy, but a low or moderate consumption of coffee," Dr. Moen said.
Journal Reference:
Brito Nunes, Caroline, Huang, Peiyuan, Wang, Geng, et al. Mendelian randomization study of maternal coffee consumption and its influence on birthweight, stillbirth, miscarriage, gestational age and pre-term birth [open], International Journal of Epidemiology, 2022. (DOI: 10.1093/ije/dyac121)
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Saturday October 08 2022, @08:57AM (3 children)
I've always said that two or three pots of coffee a day is good for me. I'm gonna live forever!
Or, if you prefer a more serious take? We were due for another bombshell about our diets. Coffee is good, coffee is bad, eggs are bad, eggs are good, wine is great, wine is terrible, tic toc tic toc and another study tells us how horrible or how wonderful some food is. Every couple months, just like clockwork, yet another stupid study.
The best advice anyone can take away from all these studies? Stop eating processed foods. Raise your own food, if you can. If you can't, shop for wholesome non-GMO, organic, natural foods, grown from heirloom seed, free of pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and strange additives with names that most people can't pronounce.
There's a great deal of satisfaction from tossing a few seeds in the ground, then returning 30, 60, or 90 days later to eat some real food. Microgreens take as little as 15 to 20 days from seed to harvest, and they're packed full of vitamins, and taste better than anything you can get from a store!
And, everything goes better with a nice cuppa java.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Saturday October 08 2022, @09:27PM (1 child)
Tried that. Bugs eat the food before it's ripe.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Sunday October 09 2022, @02:44AM
You need some ugly chickens. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guineafowl [wikipedia.org] They patrol from sunup to sundown, eating bugs of all types.
Be sure to get the ugly chickens. Most other chickens will eat your veggies.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 09 2022, @12:02AM
So maybe the stats are due to the ones who can keep drinking coffee even when they're older. They end up living longer but it's really because of their genes and not because of the coffee.
(Score: 2, Flamebait) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Saturday October 08 2022, @09:52AM (6 children)
I've read hundreds of studies on the effects of anything from coffee to tea, wine, roughage, seafood, fruit, tobacco, physical exercize or masturbation, and the conclusion is ALWAYS, WITHOUT FAIL that it's good for you if you do it with moderation.
So, like, yeah... *yawn*
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday October 08 2022, @11:53AM (2 children)
Always? Cyanide is good for you as long as you do it in moderation?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday October 08 2022, @01:19PM (1 child)
Well, yesss, it's just that in the case of cyanide "moderate" is an *extremely* small amount.
I think the trick is in the definition of "moderate". A moderate amount of breathing is good for you. So is a moderate amount of sugar. The doses are a lot different, though. The amount of Selenium that is moderate isn't the same as the amount of iron, but you need the right amount of both. (And it wouldn't surprise me if you need *SOME* cyanide. Just not very much.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Funny) by EEMac on Sunday October 09 2022, @02:57AM
> it wouldn't surprise me if you need *SOME* cyanide.
I can think of a few people who definitely need some cyanide.
(Score: 3, Funny) by driverless on Saturday October 08 2022, @12:41PM
A friend and I are in the planning stages of a study to determine whether watching old reruns of Top Gear while pantsdrunk is good for you. Preliminary analysis indicates that it probably is, but quite a bit of further experimentation will be required. The control group will be run with salmiakki, but so far we haven't found any volunteers for it.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by wisnoskij on Saturday October 08 2022, @12:52PM (1 child)
Most likely it is linked to the participants affluence. If you did a tobacco study in a really really poor country, you would probably find that smoking moderately is correlated with longer lives.
Drinking a brand of $200 whisky instead of a $5 bottle weekly does not actually extend your life, but it implies they make good life choices.
(Score: 2) by stretch611 on Sunday October 09 2022, @01:49AM
Good Life choices?!? hardly.
Being able to afford the expensive stuff just means that they have money... while it is possible that they made smart choices and succeeded in life in modern times it is much more likely to mean that they grew up with wealthy parents more than anything else; and they could be just a dumb joe schmoe who squanders inherited wealth.
But money does mean that you are more likely to afford regular doctor visits and more likely to afford to pay for your needed prescriptions. Those two things above all else mean a lot for someone's health.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 5, Funny) by EJ on Saturday October 08 2022, @10:13AM
Me having my morning coffee is good for the survival of the people around me.
(Score: 4, Informative) by stormreaver on Saturday October 08 2022, @06:16PM (2 children)
Give it 20 years or so, and a study will come out with definite proof of the inverse conclusion. Give it another 20 years or so, and the definite proof will invert itself again. Hell, it may only take 5 years between polar opposite studies nowadays.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Saturday October 08 2022, @08:40PM (1 child)
Can't say I agree with your troll mod. I've been around long enough to see this pattern, too. 🤷♂️
Slashdolt Logic: "25 year old jokes about sharks and lasers are +5, Funny." 💩
(Score: 2) by stormreaver on Sunday October 09 2022, @01:02AM
I suspect the Troll mod was from a young coffee drinker who hasn't been around the block yet.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday October 08 2022, @10:29PM (2 children)
Did coffee growers in any way fund this study?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 09 2022, @02:58AM
It was the Old Women's Abstinence Club. They've sworn off booze, sex, drugs, and everything else that makes life fun. They need their coffee to cope with their miserable lives.
(Score: 2) by everdred on Monday October 10 2022, @06:59PM
https://academic.oup.com/eurjpc/advance-article/doi/10.1093/eurjpc/zwac189/6704995 [oup.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by darkfeline on Sunday October 09 2022, @04:46AM
From the abstract, they did not account for variables like income or lifestyle/exercise. Of course coffee is associated with increasing longevity. It's also associated with high income, high education, healthy lifestyles, etc.
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