This is a difficult topic to study properly, because:<p>- Coffee consumption is not uniform throughout the population. For example, I'm willing to wager that people that eat a lot of truffles and Beluga caviar are among the healthiest and longest living people in the world. Anyone care to wager why?<p>- Long term controlled studies on human subjects are tricky. Can you imagine taking 100 people at random (not volunteers!) and forcing half to drink coffee, and half not to drink coffee for 30 years?<p>- Plausible mechanisms are always incredibly easy to postulate since we still have lots of things we do not understand about the human metabolism.<p>Unless the effect is very, very strong, observational studies are going to be rife with false positives and spurious correlations due to Simpson's paradox. Ignore this awful article, and almost all dietary advice in this vein.
From wikipedia's caffeine article:
"Caffeine can increase blood pressure and cause vasoconstriction.[37][38][39] Long term consumption at sufficiently high doses has been associated with chronic arterial stiffness.[39] Coffee and caffeine can affect gastrointestinal motility and gastric acid secretion.[40][41][42]<p>Caffeine increases basal metabolic rate in adults.[43][44][45] In postmenopausal women, high caffeine consumption can accelerate bone loss.[46][47]"<p>I wonder how partial this article and/or harvards caffeine research is..<p><a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine#Side_effects" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caffeine#Side_effects</a>
To me this reads like a sponsored article/advert. The research wreaks of the type that is sponsored by a corporate/brand who would benefit from improved public perception of coffee.
The video and research highlights imply that 2 or more cups a day is more beneficial but personally I feel the dependency created by such large amounts of caffeine would outweigh the benefits. Even at one cup a day an interruption such as travel causes withdrawal symptoms such as headaches. That means you'd have to always bring coffee with you or stay within easy reach of a cafe. Not much fun when your travel or activities don't include daily time out for coffee.
<i>“That first cup of coffee in the morning is happiness.” Chopra said. “It’s a real joy.”</i><p>That's what I thought. The I went through a rough patch with no money as a student and couldn't afford it. The first two weeks taught me that it was actually a monkey on my back. I can't think of a better term but I felt like boiled shit.<p>I only drink water now.
The cochrane collaboration have a nice document about what we know about caffeine and health.<p><a href="http://www.evidentlycochrane.net/caffeine-and-health-evidence-from-cochrane/" rel="nofollow">http://www.evidentlycochrane.net/caffeine-and-health-evidenc...</a><p>It's a short list.
It seems that some people use coffee as, say, a stimulant to try to deal with ADHD. I wonder how much this self-medication impacts the results. Perhaps unusually, I recently did a little self-inventory and decided to consciously up my coffee consumption. At this point it seems to have a good effect on my ability to concentrate, and I could see this improving other health outcomes as it increases follow-through on exercise etc. (Caffeine may also reduce DOMS symptoms, again allowing for more exercise. <a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24164961" rel="nofollow">http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24164961</a>)
I love coffee, I drink atleast 2 cups a day, I love hearing that coffee is good for me, but it still makes me wonder if any of this information about coffee is misinformation. After all, doctors and scientists are human.. for instance,
<a href="http://img.timeinc.net/time/photoessays/2008/smoking/smoking_01.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://img.timeinc.net/time/photoessays/2008/smoking/smoking...</a>
This is a pretty interesting article, and there's been a lot of positive research regarding coffee consumption in the past few years. I am a coffee fanatic, and hope that my three cups a day will lead me to a longer life.<p>I have a lot of ideas for future directions of study regarding coffee: my primary interest is teasing the health impacts of espresso beans vs regular beans in varying roast states, if there are any such differences. Additionally, I wonder if there's any studies on the social impact of coffee consumption. I take most of my coffee alone, but I used to have a raucous coffee group a few years back, and it's well understood that social interaction is good for your health. I also wonder if there's any studies which examine the rates and contexts/reasons that people in different professions consume coffee. All of the lawyers/scientists/doctors/software engineers I know tend to always have a cup in hand-- especially the doctors.
> repeatedly that none of the patients with liver ailments drank coffee<p>I did a time-management course, a part of which required writing down how I spend my work hours. I saw an hourly cycle of get coffee, work 1 hour, pee, repeat. If i was drinking enough water to pee hourly my liver may also be great!
I love tea and coffee, albeit tea more which is why I created a tea blend (disclaimer: I run actiontea.com).<p>Seeing studies and science like this makes me wonder though. People do know that coffee and tea is healthy for them, so why use it still in advertisment?<p>Smoking is bad for people, yet people do not need convincing to continue consumption.<p>Is it an additional argument for you when you're buying coffee or tea, that it's healthy for you?
Surprised they don't mentioned anxiety. I cut back on caffeine because I seem to get anxiety for no reason when I have too much.<p>I started to drink more tea, but annoyingly I have kidney stones and tea has a lot of oxalate. No such problem with coffee.
Coffee is addictive, takes time to make and consume, and costs money. Even if you make it cheaply at home, this is still money and time you would not need to spend if you were not addicted to it. The more often you drink it, the more you need to drink it every day in order to feel normal. You get to the point to where you need to make it a part of your morning routine. Our lives are complicated enough without it. What happens when you have one of those mornings where you simply don't have time to make coffee? You have to buy some somewhere, which is even more time consuming and expensive and typically creates temptation to buy a less healthy coffee. Coffee is acidic. It kills the good bacteria in your gut, which goes against the very core of taking care of your health. Because it quickly gives you an energy jolt, it is an addictive drug. Any time you introduce a drug like that into your body, your body adjusts to it. Whatever body function was necessary to achieve the affect the drug does for you starts doing less work, which always has bad side effects because it goes against how your body is designed. Caffeine consumption negatively affects your sleep, which is another key to health. Most people feel that as long as they don't consume it too late in the afternoon, it does not affect their sleep. But what happens when you regularly consume an addictive drug that gives you an energy jolt? Over time you need more and more of it to feel normal. Eventually you will need at least a small amount of it in the afternoon in order to not feel exhausted and be able to continue to be a productive, happy person into the late afternoon and evening. If want to, go ahead and believe these studies conducted by people you don't know, who haven't earned your trust. Believe that they conducted it in an intelligent and controlled way. Believe that they interpreted the results correctly. Believe that it is totally impossible that someone paid someone to get the results they wanted to publish. Or you can become in tune with your own body and reason about experiences you have had and will have.