“Are the health benefits of coffee applicable to everyone?” Three-quarters of Americans drink coffee, about half of which daily. That amounts to one million tons of coffee every year. Could there be a cause for concern? Population surveys have found that people who drink coffee usually have a lower risk of Parkinson’s, less prostate cancer (especially women), less liver cancer, less diabetes, cirrhosis of the liver, depression in women, and reducing mortality in general, in such a way that people who drink coffee tend to live longer of those who do not drink coffee, with mortality declining sharply by four cups of coffee a day. But these are all just associations. There is no way to know if there is a causal link until we check. For example, coffee really seems to protect the liver.
Take, for example, people with chronic hepatitis and let one group drink coffee and the other not for a month, then exchange them. And it turns out that coffee really helps. Similarly, divide Parkinson’s patients into groups, one receiving caffeine worth two cups of coffee a day. and you will get a significant improvement in motor symptoms within three weeks. Runners, divided into a group of coffee drinkers, reduced their time by about ten seconds per kilometer.
Lifting weights who drink coffee can lift more weights, by about 272 pounds more. And we’re not just talking about athletic performance. The amount of caffeine contained in a cup of coffee can significantly improve the EFFECT, which means “latency time of intravaginal ejaculation”, from two minutes to five minutes. Unfortunately, people who are born genetically just have a higher tendency to drink coffee, do not appear to be protected from diabetes, depression, Alzheimer’s, obesity, or metabolic syndrome. So it seems that protection associations can only be due to confusing factors, as perhaps those who drink coffee are just exercising more or something. It’s the same with prostate cancer: no obvious causal link and even the benefit of mortality seems to disappear.
Even if a study does find that drinking coffee can prolong a person’s life by reducing inflammation or improving lung function or insulin sensitivity, this would mean a statistically average. After consumption, there is “inconsistency among people” after consumption of basic plant ingredients, which means that people may react differently. For example, look at how crazy this is: in some rare cases, excessive caffeine use apparently provokes drowsiness. This is an exception to the examples. Most of the time, some people may just benefit more than others in terms of the health effects of different foods. For example, due to differences in intestinal bacteria, only a small proportion of Westerners can derive additional benefit from soy, as I have described before. The most common difference in the effects of caffeine is that while most people metabolize caffeine rapidly, certain genetic changes in the enzymes responsible for detoxifying the liver, make some people slow metabolizers.
Can this change things? Well, the usual consumption of coffee with at least three cups a day is associated with uncontrollable blood pressure in the elderly, diagnosed with hypertension, suggesting moderate Coffee intake may be a good idea for some people. But even if there was a causal link, it would be statistically average. What if you divided people into groups according to how fast they metabolized caffeine? Compared to coffee abstainers, those who have impaired genes for caffeine metabolism may be at increased risk of becoming hypertensive in one to three glasses a day and especially at four or more. Okay, but look at this. For fast metabolizers not only is there no unnecessary risk in one to three cups, but people who drink excessive amounts of coffee are also protected, which obviously means that the more coffee they drink, the lower their risk. How can we explain this? Coffee is a complex mix of a large number of different ingredients.
There are polyphenolic antioxidants that protect and are beneficial. After all, coffee beans are beans – well, they’re actually seeds, but the seeds are also very useful. On the other hand, we have caffeine, which can increase adrenaline levels in the blood, but only if you are a slow metabolizer. Fast metabolizers can clear caffeine so quickly, that there will be no increase in adrenaline even with four or more glasses a day. So then you have the beneficial polyphenols that you actually have lower blood pressure, and hence the benefits in general. So it seems that we have Dr. Jekyll and Hyde’s aspect regarding coffee, whose overall effect on the cardiovascular system appears is regulated by this gene for the enzyme, which metabolizes caffeine. The important question, however, is whether this makes women have bigger breasts. What ?! Young women who drink a lot of coffee and are fast metabolizers of caffeine have about half a baseball more chest volume, which can be a bad thing because breast volume is associated with the risk of breast cancer.
But no, the important question is about the risk of a heart attack? With slow metabolizers, daily coffee consumption seems to double the chances of a heart attack or even making them four times higher with four cups of coffee a day, while with fast coffee metabolizers daily consumption has a protective role, halving the risk of heart attack or at least until you reach four or more glasses a day. The protective effects observed with fast metabolizers suggest that the effective elimination of caffeine may have revealed the protective effect of other phytochemicals in coffee. We think the reason may be adrenaline again, because if you are a slow metabolizer of adrenaline, excessive coffee consumption may also put you at risk. So, is coffee a friend or foe? These studies suggest the possibility of slow coffee metabolizers, who consume caffeinated coffee have an increased risk from cardiovascular diseases, while fast metabolizers can be protected from this risk due to antioxidants and other available beneficial ingredients.
