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Coffee Drinkers Are More Likely To Live Longer. Decaf May Do The Trick, Too (npr.org)

Coffee is far from a vice. There's now lots of evidence pointing to its health benefits, including a possible longevity boost for those of us with a daily coffee habit. From a report: The latest findings come from a study published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine that included about a half-million people in England, Scotland and Wales. "We found that people who drank two to three cups per day had about a 12 percent lower risk of death compared to non-coffee drinkers" during the decade-long study, says Erikka Loftfield, a research fellow at the National Cancer Institute. Participants ranged in age from 38 to 73. The association held up among drinkers of decaffeinated coffee, too. In the U.S., there are similar findings linking higher consumption of coffee to a lower risk of early death in African-Americans, Japanese-Americans, Latinos and white adults, both men and women. A daily coffee habit is also linked to a decreased risk of stroke and Type 2 diabetes.

20 of 230 comments (clear)

  1. More Coffee - Less Sugary Soda by TechyImmigrant · · Score: 4, Insightful

    That's how it works.

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    1. Re:More Coffee - Less Sugary Soda by rgmoore · · Score: 4, Interesting

      There's increasing evidence that fake sugar is worse for you than real sugar. My understanding is that the fake sugar affects the sugar receptors in the rest of your body the same way it does the ones in your tongue, which makes it prone to induce type II diabetes- almost exactly the opposite effect from what you want.

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      There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.

    2. Re:More Coffee - Less Sugary Soda by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      What the hell is up with /. recently? Not that it was always an utopia of constructive and civil accord, but now every topic is filled with ignoramuses who can't write a sentence without spewing curse words and aggression. Are you all like this at work as well? Or just feeling brave on the internet? The level of discourse is tragic, but maybe it's a sign of the times.

    3. Re:More Coffee - Less Sugary Soda by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 4, Funny

      I can't speak for the others you motherfucker, but I'm only brave on the Internet. In real life, I run away from butterflies. Those random flight patterns are really frightening!

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    4. Re:More Coffee - Less Sugary Soda by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      The type II diabetes is garbage science if there's actually any science actually behind the claim. As someone with hypoglycemia (diabetes is known as hyperglycemia, btw), let me explain.

      Too much sugar causes type II diabetes because to process the sugar your body has to excrete large amounts of insulin. If it doesn't do this, the sugar builds up in your blood and you die. The problem comes in that your body becomes resistant to insulin the more you have in your blood. Thus you need more and more insulin to get the same effect. At some point your body just can't create enough insulin to absorb the sugar because you've become so tolerant to insulin. At this point you need artificial sources and welcome to type II diabetes.

      If what you said were true, drinking a diet coke would increase your insulin levels, but there would be no sugar for it to attach to (the sweetener used in diet coke is actually one of the amino acids used to make up muscle tissue, not similar to sugar at all). If your body did this, which is what would be needed to cause type II diabetes, your blood sugar would crash to dangerously low levels. This is what's known as hypoglycemia. And what happens when your blood sugar crashes? You fall in to a coma, and potentially die. I have lost consciousness more times than I care to admit because of this. Fortunately I'd eaten shortly before which allowed my blood sugar to recover. So if diet coke had a habit of causing people to pass out and die, I'd believe it'd have the ability to cause type II diabetes, but without that, I call bullshit.

    5. Re:More Coffee - Less Sugary Soda by wonkavader · · Score: 3, Informative

      Different chemicals may cause different issues, but all sweet drinks cause the same hunger response. Sweet on your tongue makes you eat more -- seems to be true for all primates. We know this from monkeys studies.

      So diet drinks increase your caloric intake -- it's not the drink itself which does it, but the calorie intake goes up just the same. Drink diet soda, and get fat. Maybe not as fat as on sugar drinks, but certainly more fat than on water.

  2. Coffee makes some drinkers immortal? by mykepredko · · Score: 3, Funny

    From TFS and TFA: "We found that people who drank two to three cups per day had about a 12 percent lower risk of death compared to non-coffee drinkers."

    Wow. I gotta start drinking coffee.

    Or, could it be a poorly worded sentence that the writer jumped on?

  3. Addiction by PackMan97 · · Score: 5, Funny

    Even though caffeine is a fairly weak drug, this shows the power of addiction. Caffeine addicts need that morning cup 'o joe so badly that they'll tell the Grim Reaper to bugger off and wait until they've had their coffee. Apparently it works!

    1. Re:Addiction by pnutjam · · Score: 3, Informative

      Stimulants can have a calming effect on people with ADHD.

    2. Re:Addiction by ichthus · · Score: 3, Funny

      I have also never been diagnosed, but

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      sig: sauer
  4. Decaf result is interesting by rgmoore · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The result showing decaf might have a similar effect is possibly the most interesting point in the study. It suggests that the effect is from something other than caffeine, which would mean there's more interesting chemicals in coffee.

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    There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.

  5. Risk of death by Oswald+McWeany · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "We found that people who drank two to three cups per day had about a 12 percent lower risk of death compared to non-coffee drinkers"

    Nope. I think you'll find if you run the study long enough that everyone has a 100% risk of death no matter what they drink.

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    "That's the way to do it" - Punch
  6. Re:With the amount of coffee and dark chocolate I by Oswald+McWeany · · Score: 4, Funny

    I should be immortal.

    Well, if you haven't died yet- perhaps you are.

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    "That's the way to do it" - Punch
  7. Re: drink up! by eneville · · Score: 4, Insightful

    selection bias. people who worry about drinking coffee live shorter lives.

    I was thinking there could be some of that going on. I wonder though if its more likely to be related to other hobbies, such as cycling, or running where people drink coffee along with a physical task that involves a coffee break. So could be the exercise rather than the coffee. Would be like saying "wearing sports clothes extends your life" just because those who do athletics wear sports clothes.

  8. Re:12% Decrease in Death-100% Increase in YellowTe by DontBeAMoran · · Score: 4, Funny

    According to my study, 100% of the people who masturbate died within 150 years.

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    #DeleteFacebook
  9. Decaf?! Abomination!!! by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 3, Funny
    Decaf also might make you live longer, but it is not worth living longer if you drink decaf. Of all the pointless things in the world, decaf takes the cake. Sponge cake. Layered with mascara pone cheese, tiramisu, but I digress.

    You must buy a plot in the Great Smokey mountains, and tend to your own coffee shrubs, that you grow in shade, you pick the berries, feed them to the civet cat you own, and take the excreted beans, roast them yourself, grind them just 3 minutes before you brew and brew it fresh using natural spring water that you fetch it yourself. That is coffee. If not, might as well drink starbucks.

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  10. Re:Wow, your experience mimicks mine by Oswald+McWeany · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I'm naturally an insomniac, although becoming less of one as I age. My kids now have the same problem, other people in my family have had the same problem. Insomnia runs in the family. When I was a teenager going through my early 30's I would live on a three day cycle. Night 1: no sleep and not feel tired the next day; night 2: 1 or 2 hours sleep max, but I do feel tired in the morning; night 3: sleep like a log- body reset.

    It was an endless cycle of those three days. In my 30's I started drinking more coffee- and found I started sleeping more often- my 3 day cycle became a 2 day cycle... and then sleeping most nights; these days there is probably only on average one night a week I don't sleep at all. Usually when I don't sleep it's on a night I don't have coffee before I go to bed.

    Mentioned it on the phone to my mother one evening and she said that she had the same reaction to coffee. She doesn't sleep unless she has her coffee. I think there is some genetic link there somehow. Caffeine effects some of us differently with the opposite reaction.

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    "That's the way to do it" - Punch
  11. Disclaimer by Tsolias · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The starbucks 1200 cal. coffee with all that artificial sweeteners and the sugar kills you.

  12. Re: drink up! by Mr+D+from+63 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    you obviously did not read the study...the study did not look at other lifestyle indicators - it was meant to see across 500k individuals was caffeine life extending...they found out that coffee of any sort was life extending. other lifestyle changes also extend life and that has already been proven.

    I read what I could, and from what I read they made no attempts to normalize against those other known lifestyle indicators. They may have, as it would be very important to drawing a conclusion about causation, but I didn't see it stated. If you have a proven lifestyle indicator that correlates with coffee drinking, than it might not be the coffee that extends life.

    If they grouped people according to lifestyle, and saw the caffeine correlation within those groups instead of across them, then you have a more solid basis.

  13. Re: drink up! by ole_timer · · Score: 4, Interesting

    here's the complete results: Coffee drinkers were more likely male, white, drinkers of alcohol and former smokers. Those drinking four cups or more a day, continued to smoke and were more likely to drink instant coffee. (Starbucks take note!) Those drinking less were more likely to be “in excellent health,” older and with a university degree. Concerning all-cause mortality, coffee drinking, in a dose-dependent way was protective, compared to non-coffee drinkers, reducing deaths by 14% in those drinking 8 cups a day. When limited to cancer and cardiovascular deaths, coffee drinking was protective although to a lesser degree. Ground coffee drinkers showed the most significant effect, followed by instant and decaffeinated. Individuals with the genetic “profile” representing faster caffeine metabolism drank more coffee Irrespective of the genetic “profile” coffee conferred a survival advantage. How quickly you metabolized, caffeine made no difference. The exact effect of caffeine by itself seems problematic since the same trends in reducing mortality, albeit to a lesser degree, was true for those who drank decaffeinated coffee. The study joins the growing unclear literature on the impact of coffee on our health. But it shows that our search for answers is shifting focus, from merely the amount of coffee ingested to the genetics underlying our true biologic exposure – after all, those with slower caffeine metabolisms have it hanging around for more extended periods of time. It also serves as an introduction to the term Mendelian randomization, that according to Google’s Ngram [2] appeared in about 1975, but whose use increased 63-fold by 2008. added: Mendelian randomization: "...a method for obtaining unbiased estimates of the effects of a putative causal variable without conducting a traditional randomised trial..." Conclusions and Relevance: Coffee drinking was inversely associated with mortality, including among those drinking 8 or more cups per day and those with genetic polymorphisms indicating slower or faster caffeine metabolism. These findings suggest the importance of noncaffeine constituents in the coffee-mortality association and provide further reassurance that coffee drinking can be a part of a healthy diet.

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