Coffee: Friend or Foe?

Image: Alexandre Jaeger

Not just for breakfast anymore, coffee can also be considered a powerful health tonic to be enjoyed all day long. But be careful, you can still have too much of a good thing.

After water, coffee is the most widely consumed beverage in the world. Americans drink around 400 million cups every day, importing 2.7 million pounds of beans each year. Coffee is also the single largest source of antioxidants found in the typical US diet and a whole glut of studies have indicated positive medical impacts. But is coffee really a health tonic? Or just a blackened cup of morning drugs? Let’s break it down:

The Good:

• Consistent coffee drinking may protect against Parkinson’s disease, though the protective effects are largely lost in women taking hormone replacement therapies.
• Coffee consumption seems to protect and fight against the development of Alzheimer’s disease; human studies have found that Alzheimer’s patients drank significantly less coffee than unafflicted people in the 20 years prior to diagnosis; a recent mouse study showed that caffeine equivalent to 5 cups of coffee per day reduced the build up of destructive beta-amyloid plaques in the brain.
• Long term coffee drinking may lower the risk of developing type-2 or adult onset diabetes.
• Coffee can protect against liver cirrhosis. One study of more than 100,000 Americans found that people who drank 4 or more cups per day cut their risk of cirrhosis by 80%. Especially good news for fans of Irish coffees.
• Coffee is an age-old asthma medication; caffeine is related to theophylline, a compound that helps relax and expand asthmatic lungs. In a 2001 meta-analysis, a UK team of doctors concluded that coffee was a weak, but helpful asthma treatment that could last up to four hours.
• Coffee lowers the risk of developing kidney stones, because it makes you pee out more calcium, instead of letting it pile up in your kidneys.
• Caffeine increases alertness and mental performance by blocking adenosine, one biomolecule responsible for creating that feeling of drowsiness.

• It takes at least 30 minutes for the body to absorb caffeine, so there is no instant alertness effect.
• Caffeine is addictive, and comes with regular drug addiction problems, including withdrawal symptoms. Anyone for a coffee headache?
• Coffee contains two cholesterol-raising compounds cafestol and kahweol, though these can be nearly eliminated by using filters (and some evidence suggests they may even be anti-cancer agents themselves).
• Coffee consumption can exacerbate heartburn.
• Caffeine can increase the risk of heart attack, especially among those people who carry the “slow” gene variant for the enzyme that metabolizes caffeine.
• A coffee beverage can cost more than $5 at certain successful franchises.

Most of the mal-effects of coffee only begin to kick in at the heavy-drinker levels. Two cups a day or so seems to be safe enough and should still bestow the benefits.