COFFEE WITH OR WITHOUT CHOCOLATES
Earlier I made out a case for chocolates, even for my dogs. Now it’s time to say something about the worldwide companion of chocolates: a good cup of coffee.
Every weekend I scan as many as possible of the abstracts of articles published the previous week in medical journals – and believe me there are many – to get a feel for the dominant themes in recent research. Fortunately my remark about coffee being the flavour of the month is still as true as it was a few weeks ago. Once again, this week there were references in the medical journals on the value of coffee, now concentrating more on the value of coffee in diabetes and thus in metabolic syndrome.
In an extended search in the medical media I found that several meta-studies have shown that there is a correlation between the greater consumption of coffee and a lower risk for type 2 diabetes. Of course, this novel outlook on coffee is still recent, and so far there are no ‘long-term randomized controlled trials’. In other words, they cannot yet establish if we can reduce our chance of developing diabetes by drinking lots of coffee throughout a lifetime. Also, much of the research is based on questionnaires about coffee intake, which although manipulated with the best of statistical methods can never be as accurate as testing under laboratory circumstances where all other factors are measured and explored under controlled conditions.
However, for now, there are encouraging signs for coffee lovers.
The coffee debate is a good example of how complex medical research is, especially when based on questionnaires and statistical exploration and how easy we can make wrong deductions from such research. Diabetes seems to increase in affluent societies, but so does drinking coffee. Or, what happened when the younger generation was influenced to drink less coffee and more soda drinks with artificial sweeteners? (Yes, soda drinks with sweeteners have also proved to increase diabetes; even more than those with sugar, but this is a topic for some other time.)
But, just for our sanity sake, let’s stay with the present views about coffee and find a health argument for at least a few cups of good coffee a day. A recent analysis found that, over a period of four years, people who have increased their daily intake of coffee by around 1.5 cups have an 11% lower risk for type 2 diabetes, while those who have decreased it with about 2 cups have a 17% higher risk. People who drank no coffee had a 33% higher risk for diabetes than people who drank 6 cups a day. The results stayed the same regardless of whether the coffee was caffeinated.
Studies like these force researchers to find explanations, especially when they test it over and over and cannot blame research techniques for new results that disagree with the older beliefs. In the past the attention to coffee has been focussed on caffeine and its possible short-term effect on blood pressure and the heart. When seen purely from this angle it was easy to find results which condemned coffee. Now we also have the new perspective brought about by the research on antioxidants and suddenly the whole picture changed. Coffee contains chlorogenic acids, lignans, and magnesium. These substances not only act as antioxidants but also as mediators of glucose metabolism. So, the direct autonomic nervous system relationship between coffee and the blood vessels seems to give way to a larger metabolic feedback cycle when it comes to overall health.
But all this can
only be true if coffee really helps us to live longer. I decided to look beyond the connection between coffee and diabetes and see if any study examined this. And there it was. By using the data of the enormous National Institutes of Health–AARP Diet and Health Study researchers actually showed that coffee drinkers live longer. Put in scientific language: “Results from the largest study carried out to date indicate that coffee consumption was inversely associated with total and cause-specific mortality.” (Over a period of 14 years More than 600,000 members of the NIH-AARP or American Association of Retired Persons took part in a Diet and Health Study to investigate the relationship between diet, lifestyle, and causes of death.)
What it found was that men who drank 2 to 3 cups of coffee daily had a 10% decrease in their risk for death during the 14 years that the study ran compared with men who drank no coffee. Women who drank 2 to 3 cups of coffee daily had a 13% decrease in their risk of death. More specifically, they found that men who consumed 6 or more cups of coffee each day were 10% less likely to die during the study period than were men who did not drink coffee. For women, the reduction in risk was even greater, at 15%.
Although it was a study that used a large number of participants over a long time and amongst retired people who usually live similar lifestyles, again it was a questionnaire type of research. Therefore one can expect that it may have the same shortcomings that we mentioned above in the study about milk.
But, what the heck, all this is to plead for coffee with my chocolates. Science is never absolute, being alive is…