More Caffeine Fun

And now I'm not going to lose my memory either. Sheesh, the coffee/tea/caffeine studies exalting its benefits seem to hit the wires daily these days. Good thing I like my mine black as midnight on a moonless night.

From Diabetes.co.uk:

The scientists from the Centre for Neuroscience and Cell Biology of the University of Coimbra in Portugal, whose work was published in the journal PLoS, showed that the long-term consumption of caffeine reduced weight gain and high blood sugar levels, as well as preventing memory loss, probably due to its interfering with the neurodegeneration caused by toxic sugar levels.

This hot on the heels of an article I just wrote, 10 Things To Like And Not Like About Coffee, which among many other things contained this nugget:

From Harvard Health, "The latest research has not only confirmed that moderate coffee consumption doesn't cause harm, it's also uncovered possible benefits. Studies show that the risk for type 2 diabetes is lower among regular coffee drinkers than among those who don't drink it. Also, coffee may reduce the risk of developing gallstones, discourage the development of colon cancer, improve cognitive function, reduce the risk of liver damage in people at high risk for liver disease, and reduce the risk of Parkinson's disease. Coffee has also been shown to improve endurance performance in long-duration physical activities."

So coffee is good for you. This is nothing every David Lynch fan in the world hasn’t known for years. What I find most odd is how it gets lumped into the category with garbage like soda and gas station cuisine. In fact, I happen to live among a populace that claims to have a divine document stating that coffee is evil but Coke is holy. It’s no friggin’ wonder our biggest threat to extinction is no longer nuclear war but expanding waistlines.

10 Things To Like And Not Like About Coffee

After a period of darkness in honor of Caballo Blanco, The Straight Dope is back with a different kind of dark. This one, black as midnight on a moonless night, is some serious Friday Psyche about coffee. Here’s an excerpt from an article I wrote evaluating both the good and bad sides of the world’s favorite elixir.

From Harvard Health, "... Studies show that the risk for type 2 diabetes is lower among regular coffee drinkers than among those who don't drink it. Also, coffee may reduce the risk of developing gallstones, discourage the development of colon cancer, improve cognitive function, reduce the risk of liver damage in people at high risk for liver disease, and reduce the risk of Parkinson's disease. Coffee has also been shown to improve endurance performance in long-duration physical activities."

As you’ve probably already guessed the article is mainly positive. All 10 of the pluses and minuses listed are from major studies featuring thousands of subjects over a number of years so it’s pretty iron clad data. Some of the more surprising stats show that even excessive coffee drinking can highly beneficial.

At a 2009 conference, they reported that the likelihood of having a stroke was highest among people who didn't drink coffee and lowest among those who drank the most coffee: 5 percent of people who drank 1 or 2 cups a day suffered strokes, whereas 2.9 percent of people who drank 6 or more cups suffered strokes. So much for moderation.

The summary is that, basically, coffee is almost always good for you if it doesn’t interfere with your sleep (more important than coffee’s benefits) and you don’t load is up with a lot of junk like milk and sugar—-which can have even more dire implications than irritating Harry Callahan.

Damn Good Coffee!

I swear I’m not on any coffee company’s graft list. But my role of media watchdog on health makes its benefits virtually impossible to ignore its benefits, which seem to grow exponentially each year. Last week the BBC reported on a study conducted on nearly 50,000 men over a 20-year period that concluded those who drank coffee were 60% less likely to develop aggressive prostate cancer. Why yes, I’d love another cup!



From the BBC:

Those who drank six or more cups a day were found to be 20% less likely to develop any form of the disease - which is the most common cancer in men.

They were also 60% less likely to develop an aggressive form which can spread to other parts of the body.

But charities say the evidence, reported in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, is still unclear.

They do not recommend that men take up coffee drinking in the hope of preventing prostate cancer.

I’d like to take the second part first, please.

Excuse me, but why the heck not?!! If I’m a non-coffee un-achiever and see this I’m hightailing it down to my local java joint pronto. While I completely sympathize with a cautionary approach to scientific data this one’s practically a slam dunk, since jillions of studies (okay, thousands), conclude there’s very little scientific downside to coffee consumption, most of which is tied to caffeine and lack of sleep. However, the study indicated no difference between regular and decaf drinkers showing, once again, that there’s a lot more benefit to our morning black gold than it’s hyped up headline catcher, caffeine. If the protagonist here happened to be, say, apples I’ll bet they’d be singing a different tune.

More coffee, sir?

A number of other studies looking at coffee and prostate cancer have found that drinking coffee does not affect the risk of the disease, and this study only found a lower risk of advanced prostate cancer in men who drank more than six cups a day.

Admittedly that’s a lot of coffee but, man, without a ton of downside and prostate cancer rates among aging males around 30% I’d say those are some dice I’d like to roll, especially if I were getting on in years and know that I don’t have to OD on caffeine.

Yinka Ebo, senior health information officer at Cancer Research UK, said: "There's no need for men to start drinking gallons of coffee in an attempt to lower their prostate cancer risk.”

I agree. Just six cups or so.

Coffee Drinkers: The Force Is With You

I wrote a very popular post last year called The Dark Side of Coffee. As I pointed out then, nearly all research surrounding coffee (more than 20,000 scientific studies) is positive but I wanted to show that even something beneficial can have a down side. But the Jedi inside me has been forcing those dark thoughts aside with new research showing that not only does coffee help sports performance, stave off cancer and diabetes, it’s now looking after my heart.

A 2008 study of more than 26,000 male smokers in Finland found that the men who drank eight or more cups of coffee a day had a 23% lower risk of stroke than the men who drank little or no coffee. And a few other reports suggest the effect applies to healthy nonsmokers too. Researchers at UCLA and USC examined data on coffee consumption and stroke prevalence among more than 9,000 participants in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. At a 2009 conference, they reported that the likelihood of stroke was highest among people who didn't drink coffee and lowest among those who drank the most coffee: 5% of people who drank one or two cups a day suffered strokes, whereas 2.9% of people who drank six or more cups suffered strokes.

"Not long ago, researchers thought quite the opposite about coffee and the heart", says Dr. Thomas Hemmen, director of the UC San Diego Stroke Center: "Coffee is fun and it tastes good, so people assumed for many years that it would be bad for you."

I’m about to head out climbing I think I’ll pour myself another cup of Good Morning America just to be on the safe side. As old Obi-Wan once said, the force is strong in this one.

The Dark Side Of Coffee

Anyone who follows my blog knows that I love coffee and hardly shy away from touting its benefits. Today, however, I’m facing its dark side. Bushisms aside, there’s very little of the “with us or against us” mentality when it comes to most things in life. Conviction is only noble if it’s motivated by thought. Just because coffee increases both physical and mental performance and seems to stave of major illness and help you live longer, doesn’t mean it’s the Yoda of the nutrition world. We all have a little Darth Vader in us. And when I say all, I’m including everything that comes from living organisms, including coffee.

Due to our favorite magic elixir and its quite famous side effect, the jitters, need to be used strategically, simply because no combination of nutrients can out perform our most important training aid: sleep. Deep sleep, quite literally, is like doping. In various stages of slumber your body releases many of the same hormones cheating athletes inject themselves with while they’re awake. Hittin’ the hay is so important that the most decorated cyclist in history, Eddy Merckx, famously said, “the Tour [de France] is won in bed.” If coffee is having a negative effect on your sleep patterns then it’s offsetting any good that it’s doing for you.

I thought about this piece last week while lying in bed at 4am, staring at the ceiling, and itching like someone in the depths of drug withdrawal. Thanks to a volcano in Iceland, I found myself stuck in Sicily for the week (poor me, I know). I still had to work, however, and when our afternoon (PST) webinar on the Shakeology Cleanse had nearly 600 attendees it would be quite rude to try and move it just because it happened to be at two o’clock in the morning, my time.

Two AM, however, also happened to be the time that my jet-lagged body was lights out. Normally I’d have no trouble with such a topic in almost any stage. But each night Europe, just after midnight, I’d find myself hitting a wall as though Smokin’ Joe’d just clocked me with a left hook and I’d be dead to the world for about four hours until jet lag would work its voodoo, at which point I’d toss and turn until it was time to hit the cafe. Not wanting to risk disappointed 600 coaches by sounding as though I’d been sparring with Iron Mike I’d finished dinner with a couple of espresso’s, then had an American-style coffee just prior to the chat.

When I’m training hard I can often drink coffee at night and sleep fine. At times, however, I’ll over do it by using coffee as an ergogenic aid prior to training. A recent study showed that more coffee can be better than less, period, for staving off cancer. But all this goodness still has limits. I can always tell when I’m drinking too much coffee because I’ll itch at night. I was never quite certain if it was wholly to blame for this because I live in a dry climate. Sicily is not dry in the least, so when I felt the fateful itch I knew I was in for a long restless night. Quite simply, I’d overdone it. And like under hydrating during a race, over eating at Thanksgiving, or pulling that extra bottle of wine out of the rack I was going to have a price to pay.

So before you parlay the 20,000 or so positive studies for a 64 ounce coffee mug filled with extra-caffeinated Morning Buzz from the 7 Eleven, remember that most of those studies consider a 2 ounce espresso or a 6 ounce mug a serving of coffee. The six servings daily that may stave of prostate cancer could fit in one Starbucks vente. And caffeine may not even be the go to ingredient as some studies showed positive effects with decaf. The lesson here is that, like with most things in nutrition, keeping your coffee servings small and as natural as possible will give your performance the greatest boost.

Enjoying My Coffee

A few months back we were treated to a study showing excessive coffee drinkers were at a much lower risk for prostate cancer. Now we’re seeing stats telling us it can ward off type 2 diabetes.

Although it is sometimes referred to as "the devil's brew," coffee contains several nutrients (eg, calcium) as well as hundreds of potentially biologically active compounds (eg, polyphenols) that may promote health. For instance, observational studies have suggested a beneficial link between coffee consumption and type 2 diabetes.

The article goes on to lend credence to the “emerging health benefits of coffee.” Seriously?

Coffee’s been consumed a lot longer than we’ve been recording history and spent most of that time as a coveted elixir. It's benefits are hardly emerging. Only recently has it come under scrutiny as being something unhealthy and, frankly, I feel this stems from our tit for tat mentality where when people get their favorite vices targeted (sugar, alcohol, tobacco, prescription drugs et al) the want to fire back with something. Coffee and tea, both having addictive qualities, are the low hanging fruit for this reactionary behavior.

But study after study show that what we put into coffee (see Triple Vanilla Macchiato Buzz Bomb) is doing far more harm than the coffee itself. In fact, there have more than 20,000 studies done on coffee, tea, and caffeine and they are almost unanimously positive. Not only that, coffee is chocked full of nutrients and lacks calories, a paradigm shift from the recent trend in nutrition--that of lots of calories with very little nutrition--that’s led to our obesity epidemic.

I’m stayin’. I’m finishing my coffee. Enjoying my coffee.

Running, Coffee, & Cancer

Apparently I’m not going to be dying of prostate cancer anytime soon. Running and coffee have been two of my life’s cornerstones pretty much since I’ve been an adult, if not some time before. Now, according to two studies on nearly 50,000 men, that puts me into a very low risk group. But wait, there’s more!

Caffeine gets all the glory for coffee acheivers but that wasn't the catalyst here. "Caffeine in coffee doesn't seem to be the link, since the same reduction was seen for consumption of decaffeinated coffee," states the researcher, Kathryn M. Wilson, a research fellow in epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. "It has something to do with insulin and glucose metabolism. A number of studies have found that coffee is associated with a reduced risk of diabetes." But before you run off to grab a pound of Tanzanian peaberry wait, there's even more!

Wilson goes on to say that there is a clear relationship between the amount of coffee consumed and prostate cancer risk. "The more coffee you drank, the more we saw," is how she put it, to be precise, which bodes very very well for me. So you might want to make that two pounds. In fact, I think I’ll take a little run down to the coffee house right now.

You can read the entire article here:

Coffee, Exercise Fight Prostate Cancer