This is a difficult topic to study properly, because:
- 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?
- 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?
- Plausible mechanisms are always incredibly easy to postulate since we still have lots of things we do not understand about the human metabolism.
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.
These are fine points, but if we factor in the probability that researchers carrying out these studies took them into account, we don't need to ignore "almost all dietary advice in this vein."
I would agree with this if researchers were not under insane pressure to produce findings (as opposed to understanding).
If a researcher designs a great experiment, but after collecting and analyzing all the data comes to the conclusion that there is no link between eating chocolate and health, then she will a horrible time publishing it in a respected science journal, even if that's what the data says.
I strongly disagree. The vast majority of published articles I stumble across conclude with "we didn't find anything". They are published in journals, but almost never make it into The Times. I'm definitely not saying research pressure doesn't exist or doesn't have an impact on research quality, but I think selection bias is hard at work here.
"We didn't find anything" is fine for a random journal (there is a saying in academia that everything gets published eventually), but that's not going to get you into Cell, Nature, or Science, or a similarly top-tier venue. That's where the stress lies, and why negative results are pointedly lacking in the literature.
I wonder if this is a dogmatic pressure or a financial pressure? Second could probably be solved by increasing public funding but not sure about how one would approach the first.
There are a billion things about which you could publish a negative result, and it's hard to judge whether a negative result is particularly interesting. On the other hand, positive results are fewer and thus a priori more interesting than negative results. They also stimulate follow-up research much more than a negative result.
Since journals want to publish interesting articles more than boring ones, and articles that are likely to be cited more often than articles without follow-up results, there is a bias against accepting negative results. As scientists are judged by the number of things they get published, and the number of citations their papers get, they have every incentive to only publish positive results.
Coffee consumption on health is probably one of the easiest things to study, because it's so easy to collect big data on it and perform robust statistics. My point is that coffee consumption is so common and widespread among different populations and genetic backgrounds that we can get very big sample sizes, and sure there can be confounding factors, but with statistics we can adjust and control for that. Then it's a whole other thing to explain the biochemistry behind something like coffee consumption and health, that will require other data and experiments. There is a clear publication bias in science toward positive results, however, if a large, well-designed study running over many years come up with a negative result - this is actually not hard to publish at all.
> there can be confounding factors, but with statistics we can adjust and control for that
The extent to which you can adjust for a confounder depends not just on your sample size but also on on whether you were able to measure that confounder without bias. Big samples don't reduce bias.
Numerous examples exist of people who are dead certain that they've accounted for every possible confounder and that they've measured those confounders in exactly the right way... except they didn't.
My favorite example of this is the benefits of modest alcohol consumption. The group of people who don't drink include those who abstain from alcohol for medical reasons (former alcoholics or medication that doesn't mix well with alcohol) and so of course non-drinkers are going to be less healthy on average than someone who likes a drink every once in a while. It sounds obvious when I state it like this and you would figure every questionnaire and analysis would take it into account, but study after study after study investigating the effect of alcohol on heart health over a timespan of half a century failed to take this possibility into account.
(There are similar concerns about e.g. the risks associated with red meat and the benefits associated with breastfeeding, two other scientific findings that have become conventional wisdom but that in fact we are still uncertain about.)
And because coffee consumption tends to correlate with processed sugar consumption (which brings in its own list of adverse effects). And with various bad habits (overworking, lack of sleep, poor nutrition) that people tend to mask with their caffeine intake.
I'll definitely agree with you on the sugar consumption. Any benefits that may or may not exist are sure to be dampened/counteracted by excess sugar intake. It's kind of like eating salad to be healthy, but then drenching it in high calorie dressing.
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]
Caffeine increases basal metabolic rate in adults.[43][44][45] In postmenopausal women, high caffeine consumption can accelerate bone loss.[46][47]"
I wonder how partial this article and/or harvards caffeine research is..
Exactly, we know it is a combination of things which brings problems. But still, he is highlighting there are known problems so I do not understand what point you are trying to push with your comment. He is not saying coffee will cause alone those problems in all cases.
I disagree. A hamburger you make at home is unlikely to contain the crap that is in a McDonald's burger. If you get actual meat, add a few veggies and a whole wheat bun then a burger can become an excellent meal.
I'd trust McDonald's buns and meat to contain LESS preservatives and other bizarre compounds than a pack of burger bread and patties that I'd pick up at my local grocery store. The main reason is that McDonald's is a well-oiled supply-chain machine with (probably) low storage durations for the various ingredients, whereas consumer grocery products can suffer weeks on a store shelf before purchase. The second reason (also just speculation) is that the intensity of regulatory agencies' scrutiny of McDonald's ingredients (especially with regard to meat) would dwarf that of the small packages I would be able to buy for a barbeque.
I believe in staying away from foods high in lipids in general, but fast food burgers don't scare me. It's fries and pizzas that I abhor.
I wasn't talking about store bought burgers. They may or may not be as bad as a McDonald's burger. Get the meat, add some spices(and maybe Worcester sauce) and you'll have your own delicious patty. The whole thing takes around 15 mins and you can customize any part of the process.
However, I agree with your point that there are healthier food options out there if you have the choice.
What research are you basing that off of? I've not seen any research on this. It's a valid hypothesis, but said as a statement is blatantly fallacious without research being done.
Your grandfather and his friends don't have statistical significance to base a conclusion, unless he has thousands of friends who drink coffee and smoke ;)
Wiki is not a very reliable source for citations :) Nevertheless, it points that there are inherit contradictions in any research study. We should avoid make "marketing" claims.
Thank you for that clarification. My point was that basing your argument on a paragraph from the Wiki doesn't really hold water. Have you gone through those cited articles? Have you checked the data? You trust that those statements next to the citation are representative of what is actually been said in the article itself. Wikipedia is great, I am all for it. I just personally wouldn't building my argument solely based on what is said there.
The scope and depth of human knowledge is so large that validating accuracy of information is humanly impossible for most interesting subjects beyond experts and the very interested.
You're absolutely correct that information needs to be validated, but wrong in singling out Wikipedia. This rabbit hole goes pretty far. I've found false citations from published articles. Conservatively assuming 25 citations per article, the amount you have to validate is 25^(citation depth).
There are 11 citations in the above quote, so here's the homework you're requesting:
Level 0 validation: 11 Articles
Level 1 validation: 275 Articles
Level 2 validation: 6875 Articles
The knee-jerk distrust of Wikipedia is so old that a paper was published in Nature in 2005 showing accuracy close to that of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Just like any other source, you have to assess it. How many editors, to which degree is it a target for vandalism or astroturfing, how well is the article written, the type of the subject material, etc.
Therefore I would expect britannica-level accuracy on the caffeine page, and that's pretty good for most discussions.
Fair enough. Valid points. Still I believe we conflating things here. I believe encyclopedias are good source for well established facts, don't think they are the main source for citation when discussing hypotheses that still undergoing testing. When it comes to Wikipedia, you basically trust it to be up to date with state of the art. Yes, research seems to show that it converges towards some notion of the truth, but it takes time and ultimately you don't know if what you are reading at the moment is a true representation of what was actually written in the original paper. Again, not saying this is bad, I would just be cautious about accepting an argument which is solely a copy&paste from a Wikipedia page that makes claims based on handful publications that I presume the person posting haven't read. To sum up, I am not against Wikipedia, I am somewhat cautions accepting wild statements like "Drinking coffee can Kill you" just because someone took the time to put it into a wikipage (with a bunch of citations).
> Wiki is not a very reliable source for citations
I've always found this paradigm troubling. Any class I've been in has banned the use of wikipedia - but not big-jims-site-o-facts.com, freewebs.com/someuser/page-copied-from-wikipedia.html, or president-facts-dynamic-dns.us.to/obama.html . I'm not saying wikipedia is perfect - but the simple fact that people have bots that monitor pages for bad edits I'm much more likely to believe a wikipedia page than some random buzzfeed article.
>I'm much more likely to believe a wikipedia page than some random buzzfeed article.
I think that's part of the problem. You (almost blindly) trust it. Not saying Wikipedia in any way can be compared to buzzed articles, but people don't use buzzfeed articles to make a scientific point in an argument because Buzzfeed is very explicit about what it is and what is not.
I feel with Wikipedia it is not as clear, so when using it for your arguments, one should treat it with caution.
> because Buzzfeed is very explicit about what it is and what is not.
Are you sure about this assertion?
The site is full of neglecting to give credit where credit is due [0] [1] [2], spreading false rumors about important topics [3], and blatantly lying that their business does not rely solely on clickbait [4]
I used buzzfeed as a quick popular example - but Yahoo news is just as bad. I recall a "scientific study" where there was a link between plastic and issues with fetuses. The yahoo news article proclaimed that there was a link, the actual science study said while there may have been related incidents but there was no positive link between the 2.
I saw many comments on facebook from pregnant mothers claiming that they threw away all plastic in their house. If they bothered to actually read the official study - they would know that was not necessary. I understand they wanted to be careful - but plastic and materials made of plastic have been around for many many years. Unless they were burning plastic or using plastic exclusively - judging from years of exposure I think there are more important household hazards than that.
Again - I'm more likely to believe a wikipedia article with cited sources than a bias site or news report. But yet when you are taught in class - that freewebs site that is made by some random guy is more of a reliable site than a site that can be updated and monitored by people around the world. That's my problem and point. For academia we shouldn't say "you can't use wikipedia but any other site is ok" - but rather "find N articles that support this fact or opinion - where wikipedia is ok to include as a supporting article".
You read wikipedia to get a broad understanding; you then follow the cites and check that they say what wikipedia claims they say then you use those cites, not wikipedia.
> As with any source, especially one of unknown authorship, you should be wary and independently verify the accuracy of Wikipedia information if possible. For many purposes, but particularly in academia, Wikipedia may not be an acceptable source;[1] indeed, some professors and teachers may reject Wikipedia-sourced material completely.[2] This is especially true when it is used without corroboration. However, much of the content on Wikipedia is itself referenced, so an alternative is to cite the reliable source rather than the article itself.
> We advise special caution when using Wikipedia as a source for research projects. Normal academic usage of Wikipedia and other encyclopedias is for getting the general facts of a problem and to gather keywords, references and bibliographical pointers, but not as a source in itself. Remember that Wikipedia is a wiki, which means that anyone in the world can edit an article, deleting accurate information or adding false information, which the reader may not recognize.
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.
Oh so you have some good sources about negative literature about coffee? because I'd certainly like to see some if you are knowledgeable about that.
I don't see why "drinking coffee is good" is any more controversial than "eating fruits is good". When people talk about the benefits of fruit juices do you accuse them of sponsorship ?
That's a bad examples. Whole fruits are obviously healthier. but juices have almost as much sugar as coke because they are so concentrated and lack fiber which is actually what makes fruits so healthy in the first place.
Well if you dont want to talk about fruit, then talk about Tea. There's about zero debate about tea being not healthy, and I don't see massive differences between a tea-based drink and a coffee based drink - they actually have lots of commonalities.
"Healthy" is such an abstract concept that it's really not a useful metric, though.
Even if we say "healthy" means a prevention of disease and/or a longer lifespan, tea still needs the "in moderation" addendum. Fluorosis is common among people who drink large quantities of certain types of green tea, for example, and fruit juice could obviously contribute to diabetes. Having one alcoholic drink a night has a lot of measured benefit that disappears when you pass 2 drinks.
In other words, "healthy" (as defined above) is not an attribute of just the substance but also the quantity and duration and a bunch of other important things.
Which is why "_____ is good for you!" can be generally discarded as standalone advice.
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.
That seems a bit overwrought.... In my experience (and anecdotally from friends), the withdrawal symptoms are real, but not particularly severe.
For me it's just very mild (as in I barely notice) headaches and a vague under-the-weather feeling; to others I probably seem a bit grumpy. After a day or two of abstaining, the symptoms disappear.
Sure, it's vaguely annoying, but nothing more. When I travel or something and end up not drinking coffee for a while, it's simply not an issue.
For me symptom were extremely severe over several weeks. In end, I could quit coffee for good.
Recently, I had some stomach troubles and doctor told me to cutback or completely stop drinking coffee to help stomach heal.
I decided to go cold turkey. Figured it would speed up recovery. A bad mistake. Headaches and irritation was easy to control and disappeared within couple of days. But my body is so dependent on caffeine. I had constipation, I could not motivate myself to go workout in evenings, I felt the world was moving at different pace than me. I just felt all sorts of wrong and I keep on thinking it was just a pace it pass soon.
Finally, I could not take it. Went back to drinking as much coffee as I needand life is great now.
Anecdotally, I've found most people who don't experience withdrawal never cease consuming coffee long enough. People who drank enormous amounts daily and suddenly quit tend to experience severe withdrawal symptoms.
I can attest to this. I was consuming over a gram of caffeine a day from a pre-workout drink, and 3 cups of starbucks pike's. It's a daily ritual at work to make the walk to Starbucks which ends up resulting in various technical discussions, so I ended up getting quite addicted to the caffeine.
After only a few months I noticed my vision was getting blurry, lacking focus, and there was some visual swirling as if I was on LSD. Fast-forward another 9 months and colors were muted, all emotions were numbed, I was insanely irritable, and I felt completely distant from the world. I felt so numb to life that I was very close to seeking therapy due to increased thoughts of suicide. On weekends I never had caffeine, but one day I decided to try some tea. That little amount of caffeine was enough to kick me out of the withdrawals and and make me realize it was the caffeine that was causing it.
It's been two months since I last had caffeine and I'm still going through withdrawals. For a while I had to take ibuprofen because the headaches were so severe, but now it's just a slight head pressure. Colors are popping, sunlight is gorgeous, I can focus on words in a sentence without my vision darting around. It's better, but I know there's still another month or two to fully reset. I'm getting back to feeling like I did in grade school though which is amazing to me. I've always drank large amounts of soda since middle school/high school, so I've likely always been impacted by caffeine like this at a smaller scale.
I had actually tried stopping early on, but was sticking with decaf and only for two weeks which wasn't long enough to notice anything.
But your first comment was about a habit of even one cup a day leading you to be unable to travel for fear of withdrawal. I don't think that's a massive amount, and I'm curious how long you think is "long enough" to induce withdrawal.
In my experience the symptoms start just a few hours after a missed daily dose. That was on one cup a day from a Moka pot. I've since cut back to 2-3 times a week. If I regularly skip days it doesn't seem to be as habit forming.
I take two weeks off from drinking coffee each year (not because of the coffee, it just works out that way).
I had horrible withdrawal the first year, and switched from 3ish cups of American style coffee to 3ish shots of espresso with water or milk. Same amount of liquid, but considerably less caffeine. I haven't had withdrawal problems since.
I've not read a lot of scientific information about the benefits of coffee, so I wonder: is it strictly the caffeine in the coffee, or is it a combination of the caffeine and the other chemicals in coffee? I've (mostly) weaned myself from caffeinated coffee, but I still drink several cups of decaf every day. Do I still get some of the purported health benefits?
“That first cup of coffee in the morning is happiness.” Chopra said. “It’s a real joy.”
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.
How poor do you have to be that you can't afford coffee? Maybe not the $5 a cup starbucks bullshitaccino, but you can get a cheap electric drip pot and a month's worth of grounds for $20.
Of course, that presumes they either have skillz or some willingness and ability to get them. These days, a lot of people seem dependent upon microwave meals and fast food.
No shit, I was one of them. But we're talking the kind of money you can make in an afternoon of unskilled manual labor, to set you up for a semester's worth of coffee.
Yes, I saw that too. But amphetamines have some nasty side effects.
Methamphetamine was the standard military "go pill" for decades. Then dextroamphetamine. Now there's interest in modafinil, which has milder side effects.[0,1]
IIRC his friends asked him to stop for a month, and then to see how he felt. "You have put back mathematics by a month" he said at the end, and promptly went back on the pills.
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. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24164961)
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,
http://img.timeinc.net/time/photoessays/2008/smoking/smoking...
Well established ways of conduction medical studies that dont depend on doctor quirks. They can establish a mathematically significant correlation. Correlation doesnt establish causality.
Doctors tend to be actually heavy smokers, from my experience. I have talked about this with a couple of them and they say that it helps them facing the stress of their everyday duties - even though they are aware of the health risks.
In the U.S. at least, doctors smoke at a much lower rate than the general population. It might be that they stand-out more when smoking if you know that they are physicians.
a lot of them are borderline or full blown alcoholics too. this stems from the job they do - depressing, stressful, often under-appreciated. they know the effects of addictions too well, but at the end, they are still only human beings like rest of us...
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.
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
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).
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?
Smoking is bad for people, yet people do not need convincing to continue consumption.
Is it an additional argument for you when you're buying coffee or tea, that it's healthy for you?
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.
Fortunately its relatively cheap, universally available, and extremely effective. It could be considered the best, simplest performance drug possible.
As for emotional arguments about 'going against your body' that's religion. Your body was designed to resist constant parasitic infestation, never be washed and exercise hard every day, all day. Who wants to live that way? You could consider 3 meals a day as 'going against your body'.
The problem is we when live less and less in the way our bodies were designed.
For example, we were built to receive all sorts of positive side effects from exercise. If you don't exercise at all you lose those benefits. It's doable -- many people don't exercise -- but it's a loss to be sure.
Another example, using your three meals... We were not built to be eating as much as most of us do as consistently as we do. Take one look around you and see how many people are headed in the direction of obesity.
When you combine the eating and the exercise you get a deadly combination.
And there are other examples of "going against the grain," which when taken individually are not hugely detrimental but when you add them up they are harmful.
> go ahead and believe these studies conducted by people you don't know
By that logic, the majority of people would hardly be able to believe a single scientific fact. According to my own physical experience and reasoning independent of what I've gathered from others, I have come to the conclusion that the sun revolves around the Earth.
I enjoy a good cup of coffee. I'm more than willing to spend the money on it. If I couldn't afford it one day, I'd just stop, and not have that enjoyment any more.
Yes it's addictive, and that would be hard, but I'd just have to deal with it. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with enjoying something that's at least to some degree addictive (exercise, programming, watching series on netflix) so long as there are other reasons besides the addiction satisfaction that you enjoy it. That is certainly true for coffee.
- 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?
- 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?
- Plausible mechanisms are always incredibly easy to postulate since we still have lots of things we do not understand about the human metabolism.
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.