I have a pet theory for why coffee has such great benefits: A lot of my friends who are more anxious have had to stop drinking coffee because it exacerbated their anxiety to extreme degrees. On the other hand, people with less anxiety drink it and feel fine. So there’s selection bias at play, and correlative studies are just picking up the benefit of not being anxious.
I 100% agree. *Note to anyone quitting caffeine for anxiety reasons, it takes about a month to notice the benefit.
Another pet theory I have is that a confounding variable in these studies is often the amount of work someone has to do, and the type of work.
Someone drinking 4+ cups of coffee likely has a reason to be that productive. Which may result in more intellectual stimulation, a higher income, and other differences that makes the two groups very different.
I'd like to see studies where the same individual both drank 4+ cups of coffee everyday for 6 months, and then quit caffeine entirely for 6 months and measure the changes in health, and output collectively but on an individual basis.
drinking coffee for years made my anxiety levels increase significantly. i started to notice this whenever i get into scenarios where i'm most uncomfortable. it used to be more mild that when i'm nervous, my heart is just pounding but no sweating and i can still hide the fact. now, with my coffee addiction, i get more noticeably anxious, where i have involuntary muscle twitching on my face/hands, more sweating, and it makes it more obvious that i'm nervous.
to combat this, i started researching and led me to matcha tea. i just drink a lot of matcha tea now and i found it helps with my anxiety and i'm generally more calm. it still has caffeine at lower doses so it still gives that caffeine feeling so what i'm feeling might be a placebo but definitely helps.
i did not quit coffee 100% though, i still drink it from time to time but not as often. it used to be > 4 cups of coffee per day (sometimes espresso shots) and now to 1-2 cups every 5-7 days.
i have to say my coffee journey was fun though, for the last 10 years i started from starbucks, to roasting my own beans, to aeropress and drip, to a full fledge espresso machine.
Do you ever drink decaf? It sounds like coffee was a real hobby of yours. Although your health is more important, it is unfortunate to see a hobby dissipate like that.
Can someone provide more information on the 1-month recovery from caffeine induced anxiety? In my experience and from what I've read online, caffeine withdrawal typically lasts 1 or 2 weeks.
I recently quit drinking coffee hoping I could stop grinding my teeth in the night. It hasn't helped yet, but I quit only about 3 weeks ago.
An aside, grinding your teeth in the night is very problematic because it's not something you can directly resolve unless you get a mouth guard. Trying to pinpoint stressors in my life has been an arduous process.
It's an interesting theory, and researchers probably need to account for that. But although it probably could explain some of the effect, there's one that I don't think it can explain.
One of the diseases that coffee helps with is gout. Gout is more or less a special form of arthritis. In most cases the root cause is genetic deficiency in how well your kidneys remove uric acid from your blood. This leads to a buildup of it, and having no place else to go, more and more of it accumulates in your joints. Then your immune system does its best to deal with a foreign substance, and sometimes this leads to runaway inflammation that causes excruciating pain.
Anyway, I can't see a connection between the kidneys' ability to filter out one specific chemical and coffee drinking behavior. Particularly since gout is usually asymptomatic for years while deposits build up in your body, and then you have episodes (attacks) where inflammation gets out of control for a while before subsiding.
The only connection that I can think of is how caffeine is a diuretic. If you're using the restroom more often, and drinking more fluids, it might result in more opportunities to filter out more uric acid or something along those lines.
That would make sense, but paradoxically, diuretics make gout worse. It may be because the fluids aren't always replaced, and if you have less fluids in you, then the concentration of uric acid goes up. (And the accumulation of uric acid in the joints happens because blood levels reach saturation and then some of it precipitates.)
The crazy thing about coffee and gout is, since it's a diuretic, it should make gout worse, but instead it seems to make it better.
Incidentally, I'm not a doctor either. Just an interested layman. So take everything I said with a grain of salt too. Anyway, gout is super complicated since it involves metabolism AND the renal system AND the immune system AND the joints, so really nobody understands it completely.
Rather than calling their palates more 'diverse' I would just observe that many foods we know to be healthy exhibit bitter, astringent, tart, sour, earthy, etc flavors.
I happen to be on that camp. Despite having anxiety I haven't been able to outright quite coffee. I also have mild hypothyroid so coffee helps to overcome fatigue. However, I have reduced to about 1-2 cups/day from about 4 cups/day.
There are some benefits of coffee that don't really fit with this hypothesis, though. Like how it decreases risk of kidney stone formation, despite containing chemicals that can increase urinary calcium excretion.
Not really surprising there. It's a diuretic, that is it make you pee, and it's a fluid. Drinking lots of water and peeing a lot is known to help prevent kidney stones.
I have another pet theory for coffee: habitual coffee drinkers are uncomfortable with the idea of it being a vice, and so they conduct study after study to highlight the benefits, thus rationalizing their consumption.
Why would habitual coffee drinkers be uncomfortable with coffee being a vice? A lot of coffee drinkers freely and openly admit that that first cup is needed to kick start the day and do so shamelessly.
There might be some tiny fraction of coffee drinkers who spaz out about stuff like that, but they'd generally be the ones spazzing out about everything.
Yes, and it also depends on your relationship with work. For some it's more important to clearly cut from it at the end of the day than to get into it in the morning :)
This entire thread starting from the GP is full of anecdotal unsubstantiated and glib responses, so I think that since we are not doing the typical HN due diligence of informative substantiated discussions, my theory is that coffee gives me the ability to produce more bullshit that I usually put out and perpetuate falsehood, untruthful information on the internet to stir up the pot, to make intellectual discourse an unbearable activity and my participation leaves the world worse off than it was before. Sips more coffee.
Actually, alcohol is the second most common substance studied for its "beneficial" properties (used to be first, but it's harder to rationalize nowadays).
Even if you assume addiction (without proof, to be sure), how is it necessary to cast it in moral terms? If it is a negative thing, there have to be rational reasons for it being negative. Being judgmental about it only makes those doing the judging feel better about themselves.
Normally I'm content to follow the data where it leads, but I opened this with trepidation lest it give me a reason not to enjoy my morning coffee. Fortunately it confirms my pre-existing biases.
I find I can never just have one cup, so I make a 50% decaf mix and have 3-4 cups spaced out over as many hours. Not only does this give a smooth and constant hit of caffeine, but it suppresses my appetite as well and I easily power right through from 5:30 until midday lunch. These are by far the most productive hours of my day.
I went 100% decaf. I sleep better at night and no longer wake up groggy. It's amazing.
I always considered myself a "night owl" who didn't like mornings and preferred to stay up late. I often spent the first hour or two of the day waiting for my body to boot up fully and for the caffeine to kick in. Now I like mornings better, and I don't look forward to the sun going down.
Switching wasn't really a problem. I didn't experience headaches or any kind of physical abstinence effects.
There are downsides to eliminating caffeine. One is that one becomes very sensitive to it. Many coffee shops don't serve decaf, and if I happen to drink a double shot of espresso even as early as 2-3pm, I will find myself stupidly awake at 2am. (On the other hand, if I feel tired one morning, some caffeine can be miraculous.)
The other problem is that the pleasure of drinking my daily latte has been greatly diminished. I used to look forward to getting it, even thinking about it before going to bed. Now it's... fine. The taste is still great. But there's something that feels like it's missing. I still crave it, but my body no longer does.
If you feel stomach aches, you should see a doctor and make sure you don't have H. pylori, "the third highest cause of worldwide cancer mortality as of 2018" [1]. H. pylori is treatable with antibiotics.
My mother had H.pylori, developed cancer at the stomach (and the doctors believe it was because of H.pylori), had her stomach removed, did chemo (which is a version of hell on earth), and she is fine now, 6 years later. But it could all have been avoided if she had taken an antibiotic treatment. Unfortunately, although she had tested positive for H.pylori, she was given a non-antibiotic treatment, and that was simply not enough.
After this episode, I went to a gastroenterologist together with my wife, we both got tested. I didn't have it, my wife did. She took the antibiotic course, which was slightly unpleasant (leaves a metallic taste in your mouth, I think), but it's a small price to pay to avoid a cancer that is quite deadly (about 70% 5-year fatality rate).
If you have stomach or acid reflux issues due to coffee but want to still feel the effects, you should absolutely look into low acid brewing techniques, you'll find that cold brew / toddy style brewing is much less harsh on your stomach and can be purchased at most coffee shops, at a grocery, or created at home with a super simple glass jar and a simple paper or cloth filter and time.
Toddy / cold brew is not the same as iced coffee (iced coffee does not have the low-acid properties that toddy / cold brew does. There are also different types of beans and a dark roast is lower acidity.
Finally, if that still doesn't work, switch to matcha. You can get culinary grade from ippodo rather than the finest grade and it's the same quality.
Another way to reduce the acidity is to mix in ground up egg shells into the ground coffee. As you brew this mixture, the calcium carbonate of the egg shells (alkaline) partially neutralises the acids from the coffee beans.
You can even combine this with the two usual methods for low acidity coffee that you mentioned (cold brewing and using dark roasts). I haven't actually tried this combo yet but I'm keen to!
I can’t drink much coffee. Maybe it’s the acids? I don’t know. I find it’s super harsh on my stomach.
I usually just munch whole cocoa beans these days, or drink cocoa powder in hot water with milk and a small amount of sugar. Way more food-like as it’s very high in protein and fats, high in magnesium and anthocyanins, so results in an overall smoother stimulant effect and is way more nutritious.
I like my coffee black-no-sugar, but sometimes my stomach doesn't like it as much as I do. I find that a dollop of cream prevents any stomach issues. I suppose by neutralizing the acids int eh coffee, but that's just a guess. Of course, this may not work for you if you're lactose intolerant.
I used to do that every day with my first cup of coffee, but for the perceived health benefits of the coconut oil, not the stomach thing. However, I stopped after my cholesterol shot up in my yearly labs, and this was the only thing I had changed about my diet since my last labs. That was right before the studies started coming out saying coconut oil wasn't as healthy as previously reported, so I just decided to cut it out altogether. For the rare occasion when coffee is bothering my tummy, if I'm going to add something bad, I'll add cream cuz it's yummy.
yeah, honestly i'm sort of worried about decade+ effects of coffee with intermittent fasting (read: coffee on very empty stomach). i am about 3 years in. i don't eat until the afternoon probably 85% of the time, but typically have 1 cup a few hours before that i eat any "real" calories.
You don't have to quit. The goal is to smoker fewer cigarettes in any five year period.
Given very few quitters remain non-smokers for five years, if you can smoke about the same number of cigarettes as a cyclical quitter would in five years, you're as good.
So, I advocate for the use of multiple methods of nicotine intake. Wear patches / use gum / chewies, and if you feel like a cigarette, have one. Have ten! Rejoice!
I'm glad not to be alone in using decaf! I too will mix caf and decaf according to how much I feel I need the caf, but the coffee I definitely want because I just love good coffee. A bit of coconut oil in my morning coffee will power me through to lunch. I do also add about ~20g of high-quality 100% cocoa powder to my morning coffee, making it something of a hot chocolate, and the only deeply satisfying coffee/chocolate mix I've found yet.
That said, I've learned to avoid caffeine after noon. So if I have any more coffee after that, it's always decaf. Yes, decaf is never fully decaf, but it's decaf enough to not mess with my sleep.
Also, I use a thermis which keeps the coffee hot enough such that I can't actually drink it too quickly. Two cups end up lasting me till about 1pm sometimes (after which I don't want caffeine anyway).
I've replaced all my cups (except the first!) throughout the day with chicory/barley coffee and it's been going well. Lots of folks hate the stuff, but I rather enjoy it.
> Habitual coffee consumption ranges from about 1 to more than 5 cups per day, which indicates that the daily dose is defined by something other than genetic reasons.
One curious question I've always struggled with is, what is a "true" cup of coffee? I've often seen people say a "coffee" cup is 6 oz, but then I'm confused by this:
Brewed coffee varies so much in potency, I'm not even sure how much the quantity of the liquid even matters. A shot of coffee that has been cold brewed with finely ground beans for 48 hours is dramatically more potent than a giant cup of coffee brewed quickly with less-fine grounds and hot water.
On the other hand, you "boil" your coffee for 2 minutes, not 2880 minutes (48h). But I'm no chemist, so you might still be right, despite the different orders of magnitude.
Also, we're not factoring in the water/steam pressure.
Anybody volunteers for extracting coffee with an espresso machine for 48h?
This doesn't have to be academic. You can do an experiment at home. Brew a big cup of coffee with a drip machine and drink it. Note how you feel. Then, make a batch of cold brew and let it sit for 48 hours. Drink half as much of that as you did the hot brewed coffee, but pease do so slowly as some people become very uncomfortable with that amount of caffeine.
Yes, cold brewed coffee can have much more caffeine than you'd expect given the smoothness of the taste. Back when my brother managed a coffee shop, the first time I popped into his work and asked his recommendation, he didn't warn me of the caffeine content. I was well habituated to caffeine, but quickly drinking 12 or 16 oz. of cold-brewed coffee left me feeling a bit dizzy, to the point I hung around the shop for a bit to make sure I was fine to drive.
> Brew a big cup of coffee with a drip machine and drink it. Note how you feel. Then, make a batch of cold brew and let it sit for 48 hours.
Nah, too many variables.
What I'm getting at is: if you brew identical batches with identical methods, where the only variable is the temperature, which will have more caffeine in solution?
I'm willing to bet at about the 48hr mark it probably doesn't matter a whole lot, so I probably agree-ish with ya'll.
When I brew a pot of coffee, I fill it with water just past the line that represents 2x the number of cups I want.
If I expect to drink 2 cups of coffee, then I fill it just past the "4" line. If I'm making a pot for multiple people and want 4 cups, then I fill it just past the "8" line.
I think this is pretty normal. To the point where we don't even consciously think about it. In practice, a "cup of coffee" represents two cups as measured by the manufacturers. The manufacturers say that 6 oz is a cup, but a standard American coffee cup is 12 oz.
I don't know why we don't simply make those match up.
> I don't know why we don't simply make those match up.
There are already so many units called the "cup".
If we do anything along those lines, perhaps we instead define a new unit, the 'mug', that is equal to exactly two US coffee cups (12 US ounces, 1.5 US cups, 1.44 UK cups, 2.4 lungos, 0.75 Starbuckses) of coffee.
“coffee cup” is a semi-standard unit just like the ones you listed are. And yes, it’s about 6 fluid ounces, and no, nobody in the real world means “i drank 6 fluid ounces of coffee” when they say “i had a cup of coffee”.
That's what led me down this path. Searching the internet for "how much caffeine is in a cup of coffee" leads to the question of "what is a cup?", "how did you brew it?", "what kind of grounds did you use?".
It suggests that the 'cupping vessel' be "between 7 and 9 fluid ounces (207 ml to 266 ml), with a top diameter of between 3 and 3.5 inches (76 - 89 mm)"
Many commercial coffee makers use 5 ounces when calculating the number of cups they serve. Scroll down to the comparison chart and look at the carafe sizes:
Measuring weight of the dry ground coffee describes the actual consumption better. The standard espresso quantity is 7 g of ground coffee per cup (25 ml).
I've been confused by this for a while as well. The answer seems to be there's not such thing as a "true" cup of coffee. It pretty much just means whatever the respondent considers a cup.
(In contrast to studies on alcohol consumption, where researchers have standardized units. And even on surveys will make sure to clarify with respondents so they get responses in normalized units.)
And for that matter, how does the brewing method of coffee play into the health benefits? If I brew really strong coffee, do I get concentrated antioxidants and plant goodness? If I brew weak coffee and drink a lot of it over a longer period does that help my body's uptake of it?
Not that knowing these answers will really change my coffee drinking habits, as this seems like a ridiculous micro optimization, but it would be nice to know a bit more about the mechanism here.
What’s even more confusing, I think, is that even if someone defines one cup as a specific volume, approximately how much of a specific kind of coffee grounds or a specific instant coffee have to go into it? There can also be huge variations in the proportion of water used for black coffee, for example.
I’m looking for some way to get the caffeine content of specific coffee types and brands, even if those are approximate.
I think the cup count is useful from the habit standpoint, but the study should probably also include style of coffee or caffeine content.
If I drink brewed coffee I’m on a steady flow for the day, sometimes making a second pot in the afternoon. I bought an espresso machine about a year ago, and one Americano in the morning pretty much sets me up for the whole day.
The instructions I follow for my pourover requires 350 grams of water. Much more than 8oz. It drives me crazy, but it also tastes good! Though If I only poured until reaching the 8oz mark it's also quite nice. That said, there is a question of "full-extraction".
Usually the ratio is 1:16 for full extraction without bitterness @200f with grain size slightly larger than refined sugar. That’s to maximize taste, without regard for nutrients. The bitter compounds probably make no difference.
Every time a coffee related subject comes up on HN, it seem that the majority is drinking it like a drug. Aren't there people that drink it because they like it?
I like coffee. I don't drink it for waking up. Coffee is also my hobby. I search for good green beans, I roast it, I heavily invest in good equipment (grinders and espresso machines) and always chasing the elusive perfect shot of espresso.
It kind of makes me sad that the majority of the people view it as a drug and consume it as a drug.
I imagine everyone who drinks coffee does so because they like it... else they wouldn't drink it. Some enjoy the flavor of straight coffee more than others, sure.
I don't really understand how getting into coffee as a hobby makes it any less of a drug. You're still consuming caffeine. There's just as much of a hobby scene around marijuana; hobbyists are still consuming THC.
I absolutely love coffee and if I could get the same taste without caffeine, that would be a dream for I can then drink as much as I want!
I love the taste and the aroma. Good luck with your hunt for the perfect espresso! There is no other feeling like capturing the essence of those beans into a shot of espresso.
I love the flavor of black coffee. TBH I enjoy the flavor and the ritual of coffee making much much more than the caffeine kick (which is nice too). I'd actually drink more than one coffee cup a day if it weren't for the side effects.
Coffee doesn't wake me up and I can drink it just before sleeping.
I just love the smell of freshly ground coffee and taste is phenomenal. I drink it with cinamone, very strong, just in boiled water (without any coffee making device) and totally without any sugar and with lots of cream. A sip of goat's milk.
I do. I really enjoy an expresso after lunch, and sometimes one in the morning when I arrive at the office, but it's really for pleasure and not addiction. If I don't have access to good coffee, e.g. when I work from home, I don't drink coffee at all.
Indeed, there is something magical about a warm cup of dark coffee for me to sip while thinking over some problem. The way it's warm in my hands, the lingering somewhat bitter aftertaste, and the smell and aroma from the cup.
That's more-or-less in line with my personal experience.
I usually drink tea, because I like a hot beverage, but find that my quality of sleep and overall sense of wellbeing tends to suffer if I drink coffee. Even when I only drink it in the mornings.
But I do still like (don't love, but like) coffee, and most cafes and restaurants in my part of the world can't make a decent cup of tea to save their lives, so I often just drink coffee when I'm traveling. And I find that, even after only a few days of drinking coffee, I will experience 2 or 3 days of cravings once I get back home and return to my regularly scheduled pot of dragonwell.
That's me as well, I drink tea at home, coffee at restaurants. Luckily a lot of coffeeshops now make a decent cup of tea as well, especially here in the Northwest.
I enjoy both coffee and tea. When out it's much easier to get good coffee.
For a while, I quit caffeine and sought out the best decaf beans I could find in the city and it was well worth it. I still enjoy them whenever I pick some up. I don't always want/need the caffeine but do enjoy the flavour and routine.
Made me wonder, who's the coffee lover? The one who doesn't change it or the one who consumes it even without the active ingredient?
Apparently, many such coffee studies are sponsored by firms with an interest in publicizing coffee's benefits. It doesn't mean the science necessarily isn't good. Although, consider the opportunity cost: we could instead be researching many other things that don't carry as high a cost as coffee (in terms of production labor, refining, and transportation), and may commute even greater benefits. Of course, we shouldn't expect big corporations to sponsor that kind of research, because it's not in their interest.
It is decidedly in the interest of coffee conglomerates to demonstrate that coffee is good for society, because it justifies the great fiscal and human expenses they go to, to bring fresh coffee to your breakfast table. Not passing judgement either way, it's just an interesting lens to consider.
Edit: oh boy. I misread the parent comment. I thought they had declared a conflict of interest. Sorry. I didn't intend for my comment to read as a corporate-research apologia.
>Apparently, many such coffee studies are sponsored by firms with an interest in publicizing coffee's benefits. It doesn't mean the science isn't good.
Usually the science isn't good even with no conflicts of interest, with 80% or more of studies being non-reproducible BS full of errors and cherry-picking.
Now consider the percentage when there's also conflict of interest...
I think you may have misread the tone of my comment.
> It is decidedly in the interest of coffee conglomerates to demonstrate that coffee is good for society, because it justifies the great fiscal and human expenses they go to, to bring fresh coffee to your breakfast table.
I don't think that coffee is necessarily good for society, and that they're doing us a great service by revealing supporting information to us.
> consider the opportunity cost: we could instead be researching many other things that don't carry as high a cost as coffee (in terms of production labor, refining, and transportation), and may commute even greater benefits
I actually think we (as a society) should be more uniformly investing in the basic research: not only in things that make certain companies marginally more profitable, because now their expensive products are scientifically-proven to be "healthy".
However, I do think it's unreasonable to expect corporations to do this research for us, because they have no incentive to, as a sibling comment of yours pointed out. This vein of thought is nuanced, and I concede that it could be easily misinterpreted as apologia, given the context of my original message (which was misinformed).
It's not the tone as much as the omission of the elephant in the room, which is that "coffee is healthy" is a revenue-generating narrative for the coffee business/cartel. Especially in light of this research being funded by said business.
Ah, got it! I admit that I didn't want to come across as disputing the claim by addressing the elephant, since I'm not really qualified to dispute the claim. I wanted to plant the seed of skepticism in my links, which make your present point better than I could in an hn comment. I actually agree with your analysis.
To try and rescue the discussion, it's interesting to observe that many "healthy" things are "also" revenue-generating narratives. For example, "exercise is healthy" is great for the sportswear cartel, which has a similarly poor track record on human rights.
It doesn't mean that the thing itself can't be objectively healthy, but I totally agree with you that we should take these projections for what they are, especially when they're sponsored by the business that profits from them.
If you're curious in reading something that builds on the "revenue-generating narrative" idea more, I recommend the new yorker link, it's quite good. :)
> K.K. and S.M. reported no conflicts of interest.
People need to understand that "conflict of interest" does not mean "proof of wrongdoing", it means being in a situation where serving one interest could be a detriment to another. There is 100% a conflict of interest here.
In my opinion to improve the reputation of this research-branch we should start both moving conflict of interests in the abstract of the publication and dedicate mesh-keys to conflict of interests in public medical databases. Much crap would be more easily flagged and moved on with.
Coffee roaster here, at 350F the beans have turned yellow and barely started browning. 390F~ is around the point where most roasters would consider development of flavor to really take off (yeah yeah pre-development phase, I'm keeping it short) and beans will be done at various points after that depending on roast preference.
The smoke that the roaster produces towards the end of roast is no joke, and some has to get on the beans, but I'd say it is minimal enough to not be an issue as there should be plenty of air flowing through the roaster at that point.
If roasted improperly oils could seep out of the beans while in the roaster which burn as well and stick to the beans. I'd say that is more of an issue than the smoke or roasting too dark.
350f sounds too low to me. First crack (beginning of a very light roast) is around 200c/392f. Most coffee is roasted quite a bit darker than that - e.g. 220c and above
The smoke comes from the chaff of the bean and steam as the beans release moisture. The actual bean never gets hot enough to produce smoke. Unless you over roast, but then your coffee is undrinkable.
Unless you're screwing something up, coffee beans shouldn't be "burnt". I can usually taste a lot of burnt flavor from cheaper dark roasts, but a medium roast rarely seems burnt to me.
I've heard Starbucks and other big chains "burn" their beans to guarantee consistency (few of their customers, if any, are drinking it for coffee flavour).
Finally someone who feels like me. I drink like once every two weeks. But only when I'm too exhausted and needed to do something yesterday. I don't like feeling weird as I do when after 3-4 hours of coffee like I'm having a high blood pressure or feel consciousness changing.
Did a search on claim "Coffee plays a dominant role in that regard because it is the major dietary source of phenolic acids and polyphenols in the developed world": https://www.healthline.com/health/polyphenols-foods
Granted it's suggested to cook these a bit to maximize absorbtion because cell walls & things
The abstract says that the majority of the benefits of coffee probably comes from phenolic phytochemicals. This implies you can receive all of the same health benefits like lower risks type 2 diabetes by eating other vegetables.
Is the western diet really so weak that coffee is a major source of our vegetable intake?
If people generally liked to eat vegetables, it would not need so much propaganda.
I think the evidence that vegetables are all that healthy is not that great and the statistical effects are not large.
Phytochemicals may be hormetic stressors, or they may just be stressors most bodies can deal with, but do not actually benefit from. Antioxidants in particular seem to not live up to expectations.
I didn't start drinking coffee until my late thirties,
and feel as if I have had too different lives before and after. My life with coffee is happier, successful, productive, contented. If i had objective data, I think you would see it was more regularly patterned with respect to sleep, work, exercise. I think for me it was a little nudge across a transition threshold.
I doubt coffee is bringing a huge health benefit on its own, and I reject the 'anyone can make it if they try attitude', but as a smart enough, healthy enough, lucky enough person in a wealthy country, my fate was very much bounded by my own lack of consistent organised disciplined effort. A little bit of coffee nudged my behaviour in a direction that has made me happier, and perhaps ultimately healthier.
Interesting to me, that this is the first time I am hearing of lowered disease risk from regular coffee, which the study points out "has been confirmed in prospective cohort studies in many regions of the world".
The way I understood it, the study aims to correlate benefits with the "plant" contents of coffee. What would be interesting to me is to see more about the effect of the roast. The study touches on it in a couple of points ("Phenolic Phytochemicals in Coffee May Account for Health Effects" where a darker roast produces more phenolic components), but I could do with something more specifically targeting the roast differences.
Has there been a study that weighs benefits from studies of coffee consumption against the societal health impacts of coffee production? I mean we have coffee farmers developing kidney disease (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24878647/) and the environmental impact of its cultivation and shipping (https://www.sustainablebusinesstoolkit.com/environmental-imp...). It's the second most tradeable commodity after oil but as it's largely unnecessary for society to function. I would doubt it would come ahead as a net positive for humanity.
But for comparison of workers/environment it’s not accurate to simply consider the effects of coffee, we need to consider the effects of the alternate to coffee.
For the case of drinking coffee it’s easier but still a bit tricky. For workers and the environment I think that gets very hard but we should be trying to quantify it anyway.
In the absence of coffee, How are they earning a living? Admittedly coffee provides a meager living for the people doing the growing, but what replaces it and are they worse or better off. I honestly don’t have a good idea.
Where would you start and where would you end the analysis? What about for example the endless number of families that rely on coffee as income in developing countries?
One could start by analyzing if the economic benefit of growing it and the healthcare savings of consuming it actually outweigh the long-term damage of its production. My hypothesis is once you strip away subsidies that allow farmers to clear forest for cultivation and fuel subsidies for shipping it across the ocean or by plane the hidden costs start to add up.
for what is worth this has been known for a while (lookup Stanford medicine study). what’s interesting is that 4-5 cups per day is better than 1-2. also there is speculation that it’s not the caffeine but other things in coffee that have beneficial effects.
i also suspect that large coffee consumption is better if you compare people that don’t get enough sleep (as someone that does not drink coffee will have a better quality of sleep - unless you drink 5 cups in the morning)
Reading the comments I've noticed a lot of people talking about addiction... I have for years had the habit of starting the day with 3 to 4 cups of strong coffee, either plain or with cream. I was pretty sure I was "addicted". Until the time, after about 2 weeks, when I noticed that the new brand I had quickly grabbed and happily consumed every day for 2 weeks was decaf. What you tell yourself is far more important and stronger than "addiction".
I've always wondered about caffeine, whether in coffee or other products: does its potential neuroprotective and vigilance-promoting effects outweigh its potential diuretic, hypertensive, tachycardic, arrhythmic, and anticholinergic effects in both slow and fast caffeine metabolizers?
