From: drarwingnuttephd@gmail.com   
      
   The Case for Drinking as Much Coffee as You Like - Every reason to justify it   
   ( preventing Alzheimer's disease to protecting the liver)   
      
   *****   
      
   The Case for Drinking as Much Coffee as You Like    
   Every reason to justify it    
   LINDSAY ABRAMSNOV 30 2012, 8:45 AM ET    
        
      
      
   "What I tell patients is, if you like coffee, go ahead and drink as much as   
   you want and can," says Dr. Peter Martin, director of the Institute for Coffee   
   Studies at Vanderbilt University. He's even developed a metric for monitoring   
   your dosage: If you    
   are having trouble sleeping, cut back on your last cup of the day. From there,   
   he says, "If you drink that much, it's not going to do you any harm, and it   
   might actually help you. A lot."    
      
   Officially, the American Medical Association recommends conservatively that   
   "moderate tea or coffee drinking likely has no negative effect on health, as   
   long as you live an otherwise healthy lifestyle." That is a lackluster   
   endorsement in light of so    
   much recent glowing research. Not only have most of coffee's purported ill   
   effects been disproven -- the most recent review fails to link it the   
   development of hypertension -- but we have so, so much information about its   
   benefits. We believe they extend    
   from preventing Alzheimer's disease to protecting the liver. What we know goes   
   beyond small-scale studies or limited observations. The past couple of years   
   have seen findings, that, taken together, suggest that we should embrace   
   coffee for reasons beyond    
   the benefits of caffeine, and that we might go so far as to consider it a   
   nutrient.    
      
   ***    
      
   The most recent findings that support coffee as a panacea will make their   
   premiere this December in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition. Coffee,   
   researchers found, appears to reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes.    
      
   "There have been many metabolic studies that have shown that caffeine, in the   
   short term, increases your blood glucose levels and increases insulin   
   resistance," Shilpa Bhupathiraju, a research fellow at the Harvard School of   
   Public Health's Department of    
   Nutrition and the study's lead author, told me. But "those findings really   
   didn't translate into an increased risk for diabetes long-term." During the   
   over 20 years of follow-up, and controlling for all major lifestyle and   
   dietary risk factors, coffee    
   consumption, regardless of caffeine content, was associated with an 8 percent   
   decrease in the risk of type 2 diabetes in women. In men, the reduction was 4   
   percent for regular coffee and 7 percent for decaf.    
      
   5582678795_15dfdefd17_z.jpgsmlp.co.uk    
   The findings were arrived at rigorously, relying on data from the Nurses'   
   Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study, two prospective   
   studies that followed almost 80,000 women and over 40,000 men from the 1980s   
   through 2008. Although self-   
   reported, the data is believed to be extremely reliable because it comes from   
   individuals who know more about health and disease than the average American   
   (the downside, of course, is that results won't always apply to the general   
   population -- but in    
   this case, Bhupathuraju explained that there's no reason to believe that the   
   biological effects seen in health professionals wouldn't be seen in everyone   
   else).    
      
   That there were no major differences in risk reduction between regular and   
   decaf coffee suggests there's something in it, aside from its caffeine   
   content, that could be contributing to these observed benefits. It also   
   demonstrates that caffeine was in no    
   way mitigating coffee's therapeutic effects. Of course, what we choose to add   
   to coffee can just as easily negate the benefits -- various sugar-sweetened   
   beverages were all significantly associated with an increased risk of   
   diabetes. A learned taste for    
   cream and sugar (made all the more enticing when they're designed to smell   
   like seasonal celebrations) is likely one of the reasons why we associate   
   coffee more with decadence than prudence.    
      
   ***    
      
   "Coffee and caffeine have been inexorably intertwined in our thinking, but   
   truth is coffee contains a whole lot of other stuff with biological benefits,"   
   said Martin. And most concerns about caffeine's negative effects on the heart   
   have been dispelled.    
   In June, a meta-analysis of ten years of research went so far as to find an   
   inverse association between habitual, moderate consumption and risk of heart   
   failure. The association peaked at four cups per day, and coffee didn't stop   
   being beneficial until    
   subjects had increased their daily consumption to beyond ten cups.    
      
   Caffeine might also function as a pain reliever. A study from September   
   suggested as much when its authors stumbled across caffeinated coffee as a   
   possible confounding variable in its study of the back, neck, and shoulder   
   pains plaguing office drones:    
   Those who reported drinking coffee before the experiment experienced less   
   intense pain.    
      
   The data is even more intriguing -- and more convincing -- for caffeine's   
   effects as a salve against more existential pains. While a small study this   
   month found that concentrated amounts of caffeine can increase positivity in   
   the moment, last September    
   the nurses' cohort demonstrated a neat reduction in depression rates among   
   women that became stronger with increased consumption of caffeinated coffee.    
      
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   But that caffeine is only mechanism behind coffee's health effects is   
   supported by a small study of 554 Japanese adults from October that looked at   
   coffee and green tea drinking habits in relation to the bundle of risk factors   
   for coronary artery disease,   
    stroke, and type 2 diabetes known together as metabolic syndrome. Only coffee   
   -- not tea -- was associated with reduced risk, mostly because of dramatic   
   reductions observed in serum triglyceride levels.    
      
   So aside from caffeine, just what are you getting in a cup, or two, or six?   
   Thousands of mostly understudied chemicals that contribute to flavor and   
   aroma, including plant phenols, chlorogenic acids, and quinides, all of which   
   function as antioxidants.    
   Diterpenoids in unfiltered coffee may raise good cholesterol and lower bad   
   cholesterol. And, okay, there's also ash which, to be fair, is no more   
   healthful than you would think -- though it certainly isn't bad for you.    
      
   ***    
      
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)