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Four Cups of Coffee A Day Cuts Risk of Oral Cancer
An anonymous reader writes "Coffee may help lower the risk of developing oral and pharyngeal cancer and of dying from the disease. The study, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, was conducted using the Cancer Prevention Study II. The large cohort study began in 1982 by the American Cancer Society. Researchers were able to examine 968,432 men and women, none of whom had cancer at the time of their enrollment in the study."
Four or more cups a day lowered the risk of getting oral cancers by a whopping 49%.
At least cancer may give me a few more years to live.
Have gnu, will travel.
...but what does it increase the chances of? Well, besides drug (caffeine) addiction?
Come on, there's always a catch...
I like coffee. I REALLY LIKE COFFEE. I drink a lot of coffee. SURE I PEE A LOT, and YES well MAYBE but not REALLY, Iâ(TM)m NOT HIGH STRUNG. I just tell MY FRIENDS to MELLOW THE FUCK OUT. Itâ(TM)s not me, itâ(TM)s you. YOU MOTHER FUCKER. Not me, you. I love coffee. HOW FAST ARE WE GOING? I have things to do. Good bye⦠SERIOUSLY, GOOD FUCKING BYE. Good bye. I love coffee. Or is it cocaine, Iâ(TM)m not sure. Or maybe Iâ(TM)m a crack head? HELLO! HELLO! Yellow mellow. Coffee? Did someone say coffee? I love coffee. Mostly triple espressos, no water no ice. LOVE the drip. I LOVE THE FUCKING DRIP. Coffee that is.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
4 cups a day lowered the risk of getting oral cancers.
Because at 4 cups a day, you're not eating, so your cells split more slowly (about 20% slower)... And that reduces the risk of cancer, since there are fewer opportunities for cancer to develop.
- Nec Impar Pluribus, or so I'm told.
I'm skeptical because, yet again, coffee has flip flopped from harmful stimulant that can increase hypertension and cause heart disease to wonderfood that cures everything wrong with you.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
Maybe it's because coffee drinks are on average slightly richer and rich people has a slightly less chance of getting cancer?
If cash can cure AIDS, why not cancer too?
Did the percentage of oral cancers go down because people died from diabetes?
What in the nine hells does diabetes have to do with coffee?
Hell, prior junk research has shown coffee drinkers have less of a risk for diabetes.
Oh, wait, you're confusing sludge and a pound of sugar (eg, Starbucks) with actual coffee. My bad.
You sure it doesn't mean that those with the physical constitution to withstand 4 cups of coffee are resistant to oral cancers?
These studies are meaningless.
I find that changing relative risk to absolute risk makes the wow factor of these studies go down considerably. The absolute risk is of getting oral cancers and dying from them can be derived from the abstract:
Among 968,432 men and women who were cancer free at enrollment, 868 deaths due to oral/pharyngeal cancer occurred during 26 years of follow-up.
So the 26-year absolute risk of death due to oral/pharyngeal cancer in this study was about 1 in 1,000 (one thousand). Assuming an even spread across the years, that's also about 1 in 30,000 for any given year.
Drinking greater than 4 cups of coffee a day has a relative risk of about 0.5, so that's about 1 in 2,000 over 26 years (a difference of 0.045%), or about 1 in 60,000 in any given year (a difference of 0.0017%).
Note that this risk reduction is associated with death due specifically to oral/pharyngeal cancer, not the cancer alone -- it does not follow from these results that drinking coffee reduces your risk of getting cancer. If you get oral/pharyngeal cancer, but die from being impaled by an angry unicorn, it doesn't count for the purposes of this result / association.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
22% of all statistics are made up on the spot.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
A 26 year study, following 968,432 people and these guys draw a conclusion revolving around coffee and a cancer involving 0.09% of the people in the study?
That's some serious barrel scraping on that data set.
That said, it's one more argument to use when my wife complains that I drink too much coffee. Go science!
Four cups a day That's the addict limit.
I think everyone knows that in the long run, this does more harm than good. *Much more harm*.
Subsequent research will no doubt show that the coffee isn't directly responsible. People drinking 4 or more cups of coffee a day are far too wired to engage in oral sex, so the result of fewer infections of oral STD's leads to fewer oral cancers.
You sure it doesn't mean that those with the physical constitution to withstand 4 cups of coffee are resistant to oral cancers?
These studies are meaningless.
You will discover the meaning only if you drink coffee. No, I mean lots of coffee... you should strive to get over the 4 cups.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Not quite as impressive as the 100% reduction in the rate of Alzheimer's, but 49% is still pretty damn good. Not sure what's up with all the anti-coffee trolls calling this propaganda from "the coffee industry".
Sure because the people who drank more than 4 cups a day died of other "natural" causes like a tac a cardia, its a blip but it could have been caused by a few other behavioral coincidences. It feels a little more like someone trying to get value out of 26 years of possibly unfruitful research. there's another study that show's no determinable link! http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/49/4/1049.short
but certainly you can't disprove something by showing no determinable results on it.
Good leaders run toward problems, bad leaders hide from them.
868 people out of 968K comes out at roughly ~0.09% got the cancer. If the heavy coffee drinker had a 50% lower risk then naively we got 289 heavy coffee drinker and 579 non coffee drinker. Or a risk of 0.058% for non coffee drinker and 0.029% for heavy coffee drinker. Put in perspective you have 1 chance of out 1700 to get the cancer, and you lower it to 1 chance out of 3400. Not worth being forced to drink the filthy filthy thing.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Google "Relative risk"
Required reading for internet skeptics
....coffee is good for us again? Or maybe at least until next week, when the media sensationalizes some stupid study that shows drinking ten or more cups of coffee a day increases our 1 in 10^8 chance of developing some condition by 10%.
... How many Norwegians have oral cancer.
Or all the other people on this list of heavy coffee consumers.
I am an ACCA student. Got a query on Accountancy/Finance? Maybe I can help!
I follow this simple rule: Just say no to drugs that's been transported in another animals lower intestine, and you're safe.
Luckily the cat's ass variant is optional...
Actually, I'm rather addicted to caffeine, and that's slightly annoying as I get sick if I don't get coffee for a day or two.
Other than that, it's a rather harmless drug. (In concentrations that won't kill you immediately.) and i really enjoy my coffee.
This. There is a reason 2/3s~ of the human race don't get cancer. Hint, it isn't because they were lucky.
Most people develop and destroy minor cancers throughout their entire life, a little known fact that seems to be forgotten by the majority.
These people, even exposed to high numbers of carcinogens still don't develop full-on cancers.
That is a genetic reason and one we still don't fully understand yet, that is different even from diet. (but diet does increase your defences too)
No, Petri-dish tests aren't a human body. So don't say you can infect anyone with cancer straight-up. Biology doesn't work like that.
Research on cancer lines isn't exactly helpful, either, since those came from people who developed full-on cancers!
Neglects to mention that people who work in an occupation where they have an opportunity to get four cups of coffee a day are usually office or transport jobs.... not dangerous ones. Any thoughts?
I grew up in town where most people worked some sort of blue collar job, and I recall plenty of big coffee drinkers. I spent a summer working in a steel mill and it wasn't unusual to see guys arriving with large thermoses of coffee. Those that didn't bring it to work could purchase it from vending machines in the break rooms. A couple of cups before work, a couple during breaks or lunch, and by the end of the day they had had at least four cups of coffee.
Now for the study proving that pizza and beer are good also. I feel I may be a valid entry to the data set there...
Anyone good with statistics? Sounds to me like 49% is actually bad, I mean, 51% of the people in this study got cancer.
I *hope* you're being facetious....
If a human's risk of developing oral cancer at some point in his lifetime is 2 in 100,000, then drinking 4+ cups of coffee per day reduces that risk to essentially 1 per 100,000.
You're welcome.
Sure, I drink coffee. At least, 1 mug at breakfast, often a couple more expressos during the day. Often I have to go running to the toilets, in a couple of minutes. I suspect I am allergic to it, or to some substance added when they are processing it. Furthermore, I would like to know who paid for this study. There is a huge industry around coffee abuse.
Every day, about 310,000,000 Americans do not get cancer of any kind.
The Sun also rises every day.
Therefore, we can conclude with 95% confidence that Sunrise prevents cancer.
It has been shown that 4 cups of strychnine a day reduces your relative risk of cancer by *100%*.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
It's not the coffee. It's the antioxidants in the coffee. For a lot of Americans, coffee is probably the only steady source of antioxidants in their diets.
It's the same thing as with wine. Drinking some wine everyday isn't good for your heart because the wine is good for you. It's because of the antioxidants that were in the grapes.
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
The traditional measure of a "cup" of coffee, at least in the United States, is 6 fluid ounces, 177 ml. So "four cups" would be about 700ml.
Drinking cyanide daily would also lower oral cancer death rates...
Many diseases are mediated by the microflora living on and in the human body; e.g. we now know that ulcers mostly result from bacterial infections in the stomach. A lot of oral cancer comes from the STD HPV. I'd bet that a lot of coffee changes the balance of bateria and fungus and viruses living in the mouth, leading indirectly to a lower incidence of cancer.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Mod parent up! Same goes for construction workers (at least when I was growing up). I'd go to the sites with my dad and most of the guys working had thermoses in-hand, hopefully with coffee inside...
74% of people get that statistic wrong 100% of the time.
rewriting history since 2109
Okay, not to be a wet blanket, but my Dad told me about this a week ago, after reading about it in his subscription of AARP's [print] magazine. Shouldn't us young[er], technologically-savvy, electronically-delivered folks be getting science news a little bit faster than the old people get it in their mainstream print magazines?
It is by coffee alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of the arabica bean that the thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shaking. The shaking becomes a warning. It is by coffee alone I set my mind in motion.
... Time to drink tea :p
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
If 100 out of 10000 non-coffee-drinkers got cancer (1%) and 51 out of 10000 coffee drinkers got cancer (0.51%) that's a 49% decrease.
But it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing "look over there!"
Well the starbucks drip coffee is actually pretty good but to expensive so I only drink it when someone gives me a giftcard. Not all of their coffee is drowned in sugar.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
When referring to food and drink, "rich" does not mean "expensive," it means "sumptuous". Rich food is not necessarily expensive, and expensive food is not necessarily rich.
Coffee is indeed sumptuous, but it isn't expensive unless you're stupid enough to buy it at Starbucks or even McDonald's. A ten dollar can of coffee will give you a fresh pot every morning for all month long. Ten dollars will buy you a dozen beers, or four two litre bottles of soda, or two gallons of milk. Coffee is one of the least expensive drinks there are (unless, as I said, you're a rich retard who's too lazy to brew your own).
I think you could use a cup or two right now...
Free Martian Whores!
Since drinking coffee is proving to be so good for oral cancer, I am pioneering a new study: taking coffee rectally to improve rates of colon cancer.
I'm VERY skeptical.
Seriously? Did you not RTFS? "The study, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, was conducted using the Cancer Prevention Study II. The large cohort study began in 1982 by the American Cancer Society. Researchers were able to examine 968,432 men and women, none of whom had cancer at the time of their enrollment in the study."
What is someone who doesn't trust science fucking doing at slashdot, anyway? Go back to Sports Illustrated and leave us nerds alone, dumbass.
Free Martian Whores!
"Four or more cups a day lowered the risk of getting oral cancers by 49%." Is that public relations from coffee producers? Did the percentage of oral cancers go down because people died from diabetes? I'm VERY skeptical.
Why'd you flag his post as a troll for? It's a legit assumption, whether its completely ignorant of the study or not. Most of the general public are increasingly unaware of more and more reality outside their individual tiny inner circles of immediate friends and family, and their social media apps. Corporate media is a dubious source of information controlled by the biggest advertisers and trust funds from big oil and other polluters. These types of funders, clearly driven by self-interest, drive the storyline the public chats about, injecting half-truths and lies that promote their own selfish interests into the public conscience, everyone and everything else be damned. So yeah, warm n fuzzy "studies" like this should be initially met with skepticism.
I don't know how it was accomplished, but I'm guessing there was fraud.
Slashdot has a LONG history of running articles that are in fact advertisements, many people have said. (They call them Slashvertisements.)
Now we are seeing stories from Medical Daily.com, a publication that seems to me to be EXTREMELY unreliable public relations.
Consider this: How did Slashdot become a medical web site?
...pour ... get me uh, you know... uh... another cup ... of uh java... uh coffee...
More likely it is just fraud, in my opinion. Here's another one of today's articles in Medical Daily: A Tomato a Day Keeps the Shrink Away: How Eating Tomatoes Can Cut the Risk of Depression by Half
You sure it doesn't mean that those with the physical constitution to withstand 4 cups of coffee are resistant to oral cancers?
Withstand four cups of coffee?? That doesn't make sense at all, most coffee drinkers I know drink at least that much, and most non-coffee drinkers I know don't drink it because they just don't like the taste. The only people I know who hold it down to two cups are older folks; caffiene makes them shake.
And yes, correlation doesn't prove causation, but the fact that it's cancers of body parts that the coffee physically touches sure indicates a causation. I mean, look -- dropping a rock on your foot correlates with a painful foot. But correlation does not prove causation, so maybe it's just coincidence that it always hurts when you drop a rock on your foot?
Free Martian Whores!
Four cups a day That's the addict limit.
Daily use of any amount of an addictive substance will cause addiction.
I think everyone knows that in the long run, this does more harm than good.
I can cite studies that show all sorts of beneficial effects of coffee, but I have yet to run across a single one that shows deleterious effects. You got a citation, coward?
Free Martian Whores!
This. There is a reason 2/3s~ of the human race don't get cancer. Hint, it isn't because they were lucky.
That should be simple to test, by checking if four cups of coffee only lowers oral cancer or other types of cancer too. If it only lowers oral cancer but mysteriously no others, then this lowering effect has nothing to do with your "physical constitution".
Cancer rates are not entirely genetic, that much is already extremely well-established ... there are other major risk factors like smoking and obesity. Given the obesity link, and the fact that coffee also appears to lower your risk of diabetes, I suspect the effect may be coming from elsewhere in the coffee.
One study found that you are less likely to die young if you drink wine instead of beer. It's not because beer causes death or because wine wards death off. It is because at the time the study was done the ratio of wine to beer consumption was strongly correlated with income. Having a higher income was positively correlated with adequate nutrition and health care. Just because drinking coffee correlates with something doesn't mean that it causes it.
is it the acid? the scorching of the inside of one's mouth? the caffeine?
I feel like they should have added a "tea" group in there too or something.
Also, good god, 4 CUPS OF COFFEE A DAY FOR 26 YEARS!? sweet jesus, that doesn't seem healthy.
I'm curious what other health effects there were vs a control group. I think THAT would have gotten them a ton more mileage out of the data (IMO)
-
HPV.
Your biggest risk for mouth cancer isn't chewing _tobacco_.
Chew, coffee, chew, coffee, chew, coffee.
No I can't imagine a way of combining actions. Coffee would have to be too cold.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Duh. Obviously it's a wonder-food that is being slandered by Mormons, same as beer.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You need to get out more. It's pretty bad. Colombian; available in 5lb bags at wally world is much, much better.
Sure compared to can coffee charbucks is pretty good. But dish water is pretty good compared to can coffee.
Hint: Many idiots think they can improve coffee by burning it, they should get better beans. Don't spend crazy money. Most of the super snooty coffee is faked for the label conscious hipster anyhow. There is more fake JBM and Kona then real, by far. You can be sold/served fake in Jamaica and Hawaii, what do you think your odds on the internet are? If you like that kind of thing, buy the Costa Rician for a fair price and label it JBM/Kona yourself. I've been serving my idiot friends the same pound for the better part of a decade.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
As a rule of thumb, just ignore anything with an RR<2 (200%).
Required reading for internet skeptics
Always remember to add a decimal point or two to your made up statics. It makes them 82.4582645389319% more believable.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
If you don't fancy the civet coffee, maybe give this a try.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World
Most people develop and destroy minor cancers throughout their entire life, a little known fact that seems to be forgotten by the majority.
Yep. Say hello to cancer caused by AIDS because your white cells can't fight off the cancer as it normally does.
Did you wonder, as I did, whether 8 or more cups resulted in a whopping 74% reduction? And how much whopping do we have to do?
There's nothing here that says it has to be caffeinated coffee.
Please stop using the word theory when you mean hypothesis.
any news on the joys of 4 Diet Cokes a day?