If you happen to enjoy coffee, then you will admit that it’s one of nature’s many blessings to humankind. But what makes it even better is the fact that it also has quite a large number of benefits as well.
In fact, one study from the Universities of Edinburgh and Southampton that happened to be published in the BNC Public Health shared how drinking any kind of coffee was linked to a lessened risk of developing and dying from chronic liver disease. Moreover, these benefits were at their height when drinking at least three to four cups of coffee a day.
Researchers studied the data from UK Biobank of almost half a million people that had evidential coffee consumption levels. From what they found from all the participants in the study, ‘78% (384,818) drank instant or ground caffeinated or decaffeinated coffee, while 22% (109,767) did not drink any type of coffee.’ Throughout the duration of the study, ‘there were 3,600 cases of chronic liver disease, including 301 deaths.’
As compared to non-coffee drinkers, the known coffee drinkers had ‘a 21% reduced risk of chronic liver disease, a 20% reduced risk of chronic or fatty liver disease, and a 49% reduced risk of death from chronic liver disease.’
For the group that drank ground coffee, which has higher levels of cafestol and kahweol ingredients, the maximum benefit was seen. In animals, these particular ingredients are also known to be quite beneficial against chronic liver disease.
Coffee wasn’t always seen as something good, nor was it known to be beneficial for human consumption. And by 1991, just like red meat, it was put on the list of the possible carcinogens of the World Health Organization (WHO).
But by 2016, WHO decided to remove it from their list. Just two year later, the state of California decided to pass a law that required coffee makers and producers to place cancer warning labels on their products. Many found it absurd since scientists and producers couldn’t ‘disprove a negative.’
Regardless, coffee has actually been found to help in prevention of cancers such as prostate cancer and melanoma cancers.
Some Coffee History
On BBC, there was a radio history program that shared the earliest recorded use and consumption of coffee beans from the western Asian country, Yemen, which isn’t a country normally associated with the coffee plant and its beans. At the time, the historians explained that a Muslim cleric became incredibly alarmed and suspicious of the beans because the goats that were eating them showed tons of hyperactivity.
The cleric decided to try them for himself, and explained how after consuming them, he managed to remain up the entire night praying.
Incredibly, coffee beans are said to be a mixture of more than 1,000 different chemicals, a number which scientists have difficulty figuring out which of the compounds are actually responsible for the various known health benefits.
According to Harvard’s report on coffee, “there is consistent evidence from epidemiologic studies that higher consumption of caffeine is associated with lower risk (24% per 300mgs of caffeine) of developing Parkinson’s Disease.”
In a meta-analysis, an average of 24% of the individuals within in a study of 330,000 participants, there was a reduction in the risk of developing depression, while notably, the more cups of coffee one consumed, the lower the risk. Moreover, in an analysis of similar studies on coffee but looking at suicide risk, researchers saw familiarity with 53% of those who drank 4 cups or more of coffee and 45% for those that drank just 2 to 3 cups.
In the Harvard study, it also showed evidence that coffee can also aid in preventing type-2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s Disease, certain cancers, and possibly gallstones.
While abnormal heart rates and jitteriness tend to be a large reason why people are told to avoid drinking large amounts of coffee, as well as how one chemical in coffee can raise LDL cholesterol particle count, a number of different meta-analyses that included hundreds of thousands of people showed that there were lower risks for a many heart diseases and other cardiac events such as stroke, with a generally low number of 25% for caffeinated coffee and 11% with decaffeinated coffee use.
A 2019 report by the Good News Network explained how coffee encourages the type of fat that actually prevents the type that leads to obesity. A study showed how in vitro cells saw immediate stimulation in their brown fat production, which is a type of fat cell that helps create body heat in contrast to white fat, which is the type that stores calories to be used for energy.
Such results that showed how coffee triggers brown fat production was duplicated in human by the leading research team of the University of Nottingham. This was proof that coffee does, indeed, can play a large role in helping fight the obesity epidemic.
Due to the many known beneficial outcomes of coffee, which actually grow and get higher with the number of coffee cups consumed per day, it’s a good thing that despite this accidental discovery, coffee is now seen as something way more beneficial to one’s health than the opposite.
Recommended For You
