Drink Decaf and Die

jose parinas writes "Decaffeinated -- not caffeinated -- coffee may cause an increase in harmful LDL cholesterol by increasing a specific type of blood fat linked to the metabolic syndrome, hints a new study presented at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions 2005."

Comments

Re:Greeeeeaaaaat

[Anonymous Coward]

how can someone be a coffee junkie if they're drinking decaf? that's like calling someone who drinks alcohol-free "beer" an alcoholic

Part of the problem with the study

[Potato Battery]

You raise up a good point about stale coffee, which also may have some bearing on the study. From the article:

"In this study researchers gave participants a nationally popular home-brewed caffeinated coffee and decaffeinated coffee brand."

Granted, they wanted to do a study researching the health effects of regular versus decaffeinated coffee on the general population, so they went for what most people use, which is probably canned pre-ground. But it's probably a poor reflection of what fresher coffee does. Kind of like comparing the health difference of between boiled or steamed reconstituted dehydrated food.

Plus, drinking all that average coffee is most likely dampening their joie de vivre. I think that little things that brighten your day can have a lot of benefits, health-wise.

Newspaper article

[pubjames]

I read a newspaper article the other day decrying MacDonalds again - criticising their fruit salads. The article (in the UK Guardian as I remember) said that MacDonalds fruit salads had been bathed in artificial chemicals, and how dare MacDonalds feed such dangerous stuff to our children etc. etc. Reading futher into the article, the chemicals in question were citric acid and ascorbic acid (vitamin C).

I wonder...

[Vo0k]

my BMI is way over "reasonable" index, I drink beer, sometimes liquors, normal coffee, a range of foods including these rather unhealthy, don't move too much, yet my blood pressure is perfectly within norm, the "bad cholesterol" detector device displayed LO meaning the levels were undetectably low, I don't have any serious health problems... I wonder why :)

Starbucks is good coffee

[xtermin8]

I beleive Starbucks was one of the first chains to insist on only selling Arabica beans. Its decaf coffees have always been made with Arabica beans. Basically Starbucks was a leading voice in the trade for discouraging the use of Robusta. You may not like Starbucks, but to criticize their large selection of various coffees as being second rate is barking up the wrong tree.

Re:Starbucks is good coffee

[John Miles]

Starbucks recently (within the last couple years) bought one of the major local chains, called Seattle's Best Coffee. The obvious fear was that SBC, which wasn't a bad place at all, would start serving burned coffee. While that didn't happen, their franchises have been slowly disappearing... which sucks, because I always liked their coffee much better than Starbucks'.

However, the other side of the equation is that at least here in Seattle, the Starbucks espresso blend seems to be growing closer and closer over time to SBC's. When I drink Starbucks, I'm finding that I no longer notice the charred/burned taste to any great extent. I've almost reached the point at which I don't really care if I'm drinking Starbucks or SBC. Not that I'm any sort of coffee connoisseur like some of the posters in this thread... but still. Whether the change is in Starbucks' coffee or my perception of it, it does seem to be tasting better these days.

Useless study

[Anonymous Coward]

There's probably some other variable involved that they didn't account for. For instance, if you drink your coffee with sugar and caffeine helps you metabolize sugar better. Or there's some chemical byproduct of the decaffeination process. Or caffeine increases your heartbeat rate which has cardiovascular benefits. Etc...

Re:Blame Evolution: It's In Our Genes

[kirkols]

Yeah, our ancestors were eating their enemies. You are what you eat.

Re:Old is much better

[RocketRainbow]

The parent asserts that traditional remedies are healthier and is flamed with talk of leaches and bibles under the bed.

The parent is from India and speaks of Turmeric. India was never Christian and didn't have a European style dark age. Instead, doctors slowly experimented with herbs and dosages to create a manual of natural medicine.

The research done that established that turmeric and ginger are healthy was much better than the research that asserts that decaf is not. If looking for a dietary change, I'll take the advice of the ayurveda over Science By Press Release any day.

Re:I've always known...

[RocketRainbow]

The problem with most processed food isn't that it's actively bad - it just isn't good.

My idea of a lolly is halva or marzipan. At any shop, you can see that lolly means sugar, jelly and a bit of flavouring. Nice start, but there's nothing healthy in that little snack.

Now suppose you have a sandwich for your next meal. Mine's on good brown bread, yours is on supermarket white. Yours has had the fibre and vitamins removed. Also, I'm having hommus and vegies, while you're having plastic cheese and sausage. You've got a bit of vitamins, but I've got more. Mine also tastes better, but you've forgotten about that. Also, yours likely has trans fats in it. Quite common now that they don't bother raising the bread anymore, but sort of whip it and cut it into rectangles.

I enjoy juice. It's made out of fruits. Soft drinks look soft of like juice to a toddler who sees them and gets excited, but they're just flavoured sweet water with colouring in.

Convenience packaged foods might be mostly "safe" but if that's how you usually eat, you're looking at malnutrition, which is definitely bad.

Re:Thank you, no really, thank you.

[foniksonik]

Parent is totally off topic... and I'll continue it... I've always wondered whether the stats showing increased risk of heart disease for smokers may be corrupted by the fact that many smokers also live overly sedentary lifestyles, ie: they don't go jogging in the morning, don't play b-ball after work or raquetball or any of the other things non-smokers do to distract themselves while smokers sit back and enjoy a cup of coffee and a newspaper. Similarly do smokers also 'breathe shallow' as a result of smoking... ie: taking deep breaths really isn't common for a smoker, also due to sedentary lifestyle plus the fact that smoking typically involves a shallower inhale in general... so the lungs aren't regularly fully inflated...

These may be moot points as they go hand in hand with the smoking habit... but is it accounted for? Could a person live an otherwise very healthy lifestyle, exercising, yoga, eating well... and still smoke.. and enjoy a life without emphesema and heart disease and lung cancer?

I smoke a pack a day but when I go for checkups the nurses think I'm an athlete and have never told me that I have symptoms of anything detrimental. When I tell them I smoke they don't believe it. I eat very well, excercise regularly and in general keep my body in good shape. I also take Taurine, a fish based enzyme that helps to avoid arterial hardening by improving elasticity of blood vessels (vitamin C does the same in large doses). I wouldn't say I do more preventative healthcare than a non-smoker however... just a few things differently.

I mention heart-disease and emphesema because they are a much larger percentage of smoking related illlnesses than lung cancer which I believe is nearly as prevalent in non-smokers as in smokers, though when smokers get it it's all, 'must be from smoking' (my grandfather had lung cancer, smoked from age 14 to 40s but was also in the Navy, stationed on the first nuclear subs... hmmm.. was it smoking that did him in or exposure to radiation).

To sum up, is it really smoking that increases disease or is it the lifestyle that many smokers live???? moreso than non-smokers.

Re:Roasting decreases caffeine

[Icculus]

It's also a misconception that there is such a thing as 'espresso roast', and, if such a thing did exist, that it is a very dark roast. Typically espresso freaks will roast a bit lighter (a 'full city' roast) for the best flavor, but different roasts suit different varieties better. I think it's the big coffee houses that have made this 'espresso roast' so prevalant. But you are 100% correct on the ligher=more caffeine front

sanitation, dood, sanitation

[Anonymous Coward]

b) If modern technology and modern medicine is so bad and evil and god knows what else, please explain to me why life expectancy in Humans today is about 30-40% more than 100 years ago. Its about living better for a longer time, or what am I missing?

Nothing has done more for human longevity than modern sanitation. Nothing has done more to make people healthy than not having to walk through shit flowing in the street.

My grandfather's side was especially long-lived - his parents and grandparents regularly lived into their 90's and 100's. (Grandpa _might_ make it to 90, but he's just hanging on by a thread...) But they lived on a farm, or in a rural setting, where there wasn't a concentration of bodies generating copious amounts of shit. Sewer system technology is only about a hundred years old, making city dwelling a healthier choice for the past 100 years.

People thrive despite technological medicine, not 'because of'.

Re:gaming... bad!, coffee..... bad!

[Google85]

I hope they won't research my third addiction. I haven't spend years building my porn collection just to hear it's unhealty.

Too late... "Porn makes you blind: official"

Turkish Coffee vs. Americanos

[billstewart]

20 years ago I was travelling around the Middle East. Any time the bus would stop, within 2 minutes the driver would be hanging out with people drinking a little cup of half-mud local-style coffee. Any time any of the _passengers_ wanted coffee, anywhere, we'd get handed powdered-Nescafe, because they know that's what Americans drink (and in fact, for most of the people in the group**, that was true.) Arrrgh. I want coffee strong enough the spoon doesn't fall over when you stir it, but just weak enough that the spoon doesn't actually dissolve. After a couple of tries I was able to convince some places to give me coffee the way the locals drink it - much better... And then there was the place out in the wadi where Moses or Lawrence of Arabia had done something (I forget which; somewhere in southern Jordan anyway), where I had coffee with the local historical-monument-guards, which was much more civilized in spite of being in a tent in the middle of nowhere.

Jordan's version of Turkish coffee is a bit different from the Greek or Turkish stuff, just as most of the common Middle Eastern cuisine varies a bit from place to place, but it's pretty similar. But you're wrong about "Americano" being a joke - to us, it's not "the stupid way stupid Americans like their coffee watered down from the way normal people drink it", it's "coffee made the strength Americans like it at home, with enough water in it that you can drink a whole cup of hot liquid, instead of drinking an octuple-espresso which is what you'd get if you asked the Italians/French to make you 250ml of coffee." Yeah, ok, it's watered down, but it's no more diluted than drinking a latte - it's just diluted with water instead of milk.

**Yes, I was with tourists; my wife knew the guy leading the group, who'd been travelling to the Middle East on various business for about 60 years, and we wanted to go there with him while he was still in reasonable health, so there was us, a 40-year-old guy, and a bunch of old people who prefered powdered nescafe. Got to see all kinds of cool places in Jordan and Egypt as well as the usual modern tourist traps and the usual 4th-century pilgramage tourist traps.