WASHINGTON — A new study suggests that your morning brew might be doing more than just perking you up — it could be protecting you from a range of serious heart conditions. Researchers working with the Endocrine Society have found that drinking a moderate amount of coffee is associated with a lower risk of developing multiple cardiometabolic diseases. In simpler terms, your daily cup of coffee (or three) might help ward off conditions like Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and stroke.
“Consuming three cups of coffee, or 200-300 mg caffeine, per day might help to reduce the risk of developing cardiometabolic multimorbidity in individuals without any cardiometabolic disease,” says Dr. Chaofu Ke, the lead author of the study from Suzhou Medical College in China, in a media release.
Coffee, wine, chocolate… it feels like every day there’s a new study showing how they’re either great for you or how they’re giving you cancer.
Why not both? They might be all true. It is totally possible something reduces your chance to get diabetes but increases your chance for liver cancer.
Most of these do not account for socioeconomic status of the test subjects or people willfully ignore them for a better narrative in derivative articles. They therefore boil down to: “people who can afford nice things live longer” Which would not be a great headline.
Much like the way we were told for ages that a glass of wine every day was good for our health. I think the latest research is showing no evidence of that, but rather that any amount of alcohol raises the risk of cancer.
People who drink moderate amounts of wine regularly tend to have higher income, and thus better health in general. At least that’s the last generally accepting hypothesis I last saw.
A problem with the older studies that seemed to indicate that alcohol had health benefits was also that their control group, the people who didn’t drink, turned out largely not to do so because they already had severe medical problems. They weren’t allowed to drink because of them.
Compared to them it looked like the people who did drink were more healthy on average. So they concluded there must be health benefits to drinking alcohol.
This “Science VS” episode is about that (and has a bunch of citations in its transcript): https://gimletmedia.com/shows/science-vs/llhdgj
The era of that was also the first time these studies were being done predominantly with non-smokers. It was hard to disentangle the health effects of smoking with everything else. Smoking rates drop through the 80s and 90s, and wine and coffee suddenly look pretty good compared to how bad we thought they were.
I can tell you right now chocolate has a positive effect. My brain just zonks out sometimes. Like I can’t do 2+2. But chocolate jump starts it right back into normal. I’m not going to sit here and say it’s a miracle food you can eat all day with no downsides but it definitely does something positive.
Have you tried seeing if any sugary snack give you the same effect? Sounds like the effects of a dip in blood sugar.
They do not. I have a TBI that does weird and fun stuff with my brain.