1st October, International Coffee Day, prepare yourself
☕Who knew? Not me! Until the convener of the Wexford Science Café told us . . . and arranged for the nearest date [every third Tuesday of the month, folks] to look at the health science of coffee. He parceled out some analyses among three of the usual suspects. I was tasked to summarize the work of Peter Kistler, a cardiologist from Melbourne. Anne read a paper by Jennifer Temple, from Nutrition and Health, U.Buffalo NY. And Padraig took the interface between James Hoffmann, coffee podcaster and Tim Spector, a gut microbiome maven from UCL, UK. Links and refs at post-foot
☕But, from the evidence gathered and presented at WexSciCaf two weeks ago, coffee should really be promoted as a health-bev. And for A Lot of my section of YT presenters whore themselves out for goop-adjacent products I've underlined evidence, because YT is chocha-mocha with 🧲attractive🧲 assertions about the health bennies of woo.
☕In many cases the benefits are not due to caffeine, because decaf is quite as beneficial. Coffee is a complex chemical cocktail [soluble fibre; quinic acid; chlorogenic acid; citrate; complex carbohydrates; diterpenes]. Also in several of the reliable studies, the effects are U-shaped: abstainers and over-indulgers [>4 cups a day] get sicker than moderate 2-3 cups a day. Documented coffee-bennee:
- 25% ↓↓ likelihood of heart attack
- 6% ↓↓ atrial fibrillation AF
- transitory ↑↑ in blood pressure in coffee noobs;
- after 2 weeks zero effect
- 12% ↓↓ incidence of type-2 [late onset] diabetes
- 13% ↑↑ energy expenditure so ↓↓ obesity and metabolic syndrome
- 20% ↓↓ brain blood flow, so ↓↓ stroke incidence
- 11% ↓↓ in heart failure
☕Kistler's group in particular have trawled the peer-reviewed scientific literature to carry out a meta-analysis of coffee's effects. Meta-analysis will weight larger, longer, case-control studies over small reports with large HEADLINE effects which cannot be reproduced in larger samples, or in a different cohort.
☕One intriguing observation comes out of Spector's UCL microbiome research. The protocol is to invite volunteers to keep a food diary for an extended time and take periodic health check ups with questionnaires about mood, cognitive ability, BP, 'bloods' for circulating inflammatory markers and . . . fecal samples. Team Spector ran those 💩💩 sample and wrote up the results: Coffee consumption is associated with intestinal Lawsonibacter asaccharolyticus abundance and prevalence across multiple cohorts. Lawsonibacter is anaerobic and not a million evolutionary miles from Clostridium spp. [bloboprev] several of which are associated with serious adverse human health outcomes [C.diff, botulism]. Lawsonibacter loves coffee, all adults will have a little of this bug in their gut-soup but they grow gangbusters when you start to take coffee. One of the by-products of its metabolism is butyrate which is known as an essential immune modulator.
☕ coffee is loaded with fibre. Most of us in the West subsist on a fibre-light diet. Denis "lymphoma" Burkitt was banging on the virtues of fibre for at least 40 years. I think his, and my, idea of "fibre" was all about oatmeal, wholemeal bread and mighty floaters in the t'ilet. But define fibre as complex chained carbs, beloved of good bacteria, and it turns out that 2-3 cups of coffee is supplying 20-30% of the fibre in our fibre depleted diet!
Footnotes, references- Temple 2017 The Safety of Ingested Caffeine: A Comprehensive Review
- Kistler 2018a Caffeine and Arrhythmias Time to Grind the Data
- Kistler 2018b Cardiovascular effects of caffeinated beverages
- Hoffmann and Spector Coffee's hidden health benefits [70min YT]
- Lawsonibacter, and also isolation
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