The Health Benefits of Coffee | Hacker News Reader

The Health Benefits of Coffee

nytimes.com

51 pointslxm80 comments

Kill-or-cure says Coffee both causes and prevents cancer: https://kill-or-cure.herokuapp.com/a-z/c#term133 (same for caffeine (https://kill-or-cure.herokuapp.com/a-z/c#term94)

Coffee contains both pro and anti oxidants.

Its amazing in preventing colon cancer, reducing the size and slowing the growth of colon cancer.

Its also good for people with gout as it helps the body excrete uric acid before it builds up in the blood.

Bc Americans eat such a poor Diet its probably they're #1 source of antioxidants

I can't read the article, but the fact that they include suicide in the list indicates a strong possiblity that they did not control for socioeconomic factors.

Maybe richer people drink more coffee, and also tend to die less?

Sorry if it's an easy critique but it's hard to believe the substance that basically only raises your heart rate is actually doing anything (good) long term.

Without reading, I remember few years ago when every other weeks in major media I was reading Coffee good for your health, Coffee bad for your health depending what party was sponsoring study or article...

Only coffee producers seem to be funding these studies as far as I've seen. Do you have counter-examples?

I do not drink coffee, only bitter taste I can cope is beer :D

I always thought it was bizarre that the official dietary guidelines from the federal government (FDA) classify FIVE cups of coffee as a “moderate amount” that’s part of a healthy diet.

coming from the same government that considers ketchup a vegetable in school lunches, im hardly surprised a thirty six billion dollar industry may have had some success in regulatory capture to convince the public that nearly two litres of coffee a day is "moderate" or "healthy"

In the studies I have read it's not uncommon to code about that much coffee as moderate. Caffeine tolerance builds pretty fast.

There are “cups” and there are mugs and tumblers. One mug from Starbucks is equal to three cups from my coffee maker.

Five “cups” fit in a large yeti tumbler. At least, those are the cups as bathed on my coffee maker. Not sure if it’s an international standard.

Depends on what is yeti tumbler, hehe. My steel cup is about 400ml, I drink four such cups daily, normal strength coffee.

A coffee “cup” in the US is typically four ounces, or half of a standard cup:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cup_(unit)#Coffee_cup

The FDA defines it as 8 in this context.

Thank you, I stand corrected. That is a lot of coffee!

My "mug" in the morning is about 13-14oz.

If I have two between 6 and 10am, that's almost 4 cups. I've certainly had more on occasion. It's not that much

Oh good, now I don’t feel so bad.

It's worth noting that these are cups, the imperial unit of measurement, not cups, the vessels you drink from. Five cups of coffee is two large coffees at most coffee shops.

The confusion the "cup" measurement causes to Americans trying to understand food guidelines is possibly the worst harm caused by our failure to adopt the metric system.

Or five cups is 13 to 20 demitasse cups [1] if you live in Europe, which would be an enormous amount of coffee!

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demitasse

The coffee you serve in one of those is brewed roughly three times as strong as coffee that is typically served in the US, so it would be roughly equivalent to 5-7 of those diluted with 3-4 cups of water.

Five cups as in ~1.25 L of coffee? That seems like a lot. Do they give the equivalent in caffeine?

Even that wouldn't help because depending on the variety/roast/brewing technique the caffeine concentration will vary wildly.

I don't buy it. Makes it harder to sleep and often gives me heart palpitations or at least makes me quite aware of my pulse when I am doing nothing.

And as far as thinking, I think over the course of the day I actually lose out, because early on I am making more progress but then within not too long I start to feel a bit worn out and even though my brain is trying harder than normal the resources have been used up faster and so there is a performance deficit after a bit.

Different people react to caffeine differently. That really has no comment on its anti or pro oxidant qualities that can prevent or cause cancer.

As far as heart health goes, moderate amounts of caffeine only effects you temporarily.

Try green tea or an l-thenanine supplement (contained in green tea). It has a calming effect without a relaxing effect, allowing the caffeine to do its job without giving you the jitters.

So you have to drink that green tea and also the coffee?

no i said drink green tea

take l-theanine (as a supplement) with coffee - that is, if you wished to drink coffee and reap the benefits without the jitters.

Sure. Have fun. Myself I can no longer imbibe. Why? Crushing headaches, stomach upset and other digestive issues. I did love every kind of coffee back in the day though. Shame.

Try cold brew. Easier on the stomach.

is there a small home kit way to do this?

All the ones in coffee shops i've seen involve an awful lot of tall glasswork...

You just need to buy a coffee sack or something similar to it and a big pitcher. 1 cup of ground coffee (coarse ground preferred but regular ground coffee works too) to 4 cups of water. Or 1:4 ratio of your preferred measurement vessel should work. The grounds go in the sack and then you put the sack into your pitcher with water. In about 18-24 hours, you can remove the sack and have a pitcher of cold brew coffee for the rest of the week.

EDIT: 18-24 hours refrigerated

I used to do it in my french press. Load up grounds and cold water, put in the fridge 24 hours, press down when ready to drink.

Yup, tried it. Was delicious. I've tried nearly everything. It's the caffeine. Some dark chocolate after noon messes up my bedtime by several hours. F-n sucks.

:-/

Decaf? :)

(I'm thinking of switching to some decaf myself.)

For a paywall-free & ad-free take on this, E4 of the Thinking Nutrition podcast[1] has a well-sourced scientific breakdown of the health benefits of coffee.

[1] https://www.thinkingnutrition.com.au/podcast/

> In fact, in numerous studies conducted throughout the world, consuming four or five eight-ounce cups of coffee (or about 400 milligrams of caffeine) a day has been associated with reduced death rates.

That seems like an absurd amount of coffee to drink in one day, no?

yeah during my worse abuses of coffee i was pushing my limits in 5-6 and regretting it purely from a "sick feeling".

I don't have any issues sleeping no matter how much coffee I drink. but "stomaching it" is a different matter entirely.

My IBS looks at this and thinks "No shit, Sherlock! Actually is gonna be tons of shit after this".

Stepping aside myself trying to make a Brazilian's joke in English, a single cup of coffee (around 80mg-120mg) really give me cramps and sometimes diarrhea.

It is, but maybe it helped surface a small signal that was always there but harder to identify in people who drank less, for example.

150mg for a double shot of espresso, knock back three before lunch. Boom, I'm at 450mg and it's not really a whole load of volume to drink.

It's easier than you think!

Holy shit, I would be bouncing off the walls if I drank that much coffee. I can't even handle one in the morning and one in the afternoon or I will be awake until 4 in the morning

IIRC the half-life of caffeine is approx 12 hours. So if you put caffeine in your body at 2:00 PM, half of it is still there at 2:00 AM.

Different sources quote a half-life of 3-5 hours in healthy individuals who are not pregnant.

https://sleepeducation.org/sleep-caffeine/ Caffeine begins to affect your body very quickly. It reaches a peak level in your blood within 30 to 60 minutes. It has a half-life of 3 to 5 hours.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK223808/ The mean half-life of caffeine in plasma of healthy individuals is about 5 hours. However, caffeine's elimination half-life may range between 1.5 and 9.5 hours,

https://www.news-medical.net/health/Caffeine-Pharmacology.as... The half-life of caffeine (time taken for the body to eliminate one-half of the caffeine) varies widely between people, depending on factors such as age, body weight, pregnancy status, medication intake and liver health. In healthy adults, the half-life is approximately 5 to 6 hours. Heavy cigarette smoking can decrease the half-life of caffeine by up to a half and in pregnancy, the half-life may be increased by as much as 15 hours. [...] The stimulatory effects of caffeine may begin as early as 15 minutes after ingesting the drug and last as long as six hours.

People metabolize caffeine at wildly different rates depending on their genes. One cup every other day in the morning is my limit until I see significant effects on deep sleep (as measured by a Dreem 2.) :/

That's the way to do it. No sugars or anything, just that great taste.

I saved a huge amount of money going from pods to a manual Breville Barista, which whilst making coffee shop quality brew is also far better for the environment. Price of purchase was recovered in 6 months, and all savings from there.

What is manual about a bee like barista?

Sorry, probably a joke over head case, but on the https://www.breville.com/us/en/products/espresso/bes870.html you pick grind setting and amount yourself. There are others that do everything automatically, at a much higher price.

Heads up, this depends on what you mean by double shot of espresso. One ‘payload’ of espresso as regularly consumed is usually 15-18g of ground coffee and has about 75mg of caffeine. Confusingly, traditionally and especially in Italy this is called a ‘double’ espresso. Because of that reason it’s better to talk about caffeine in terms of grams in.

Unless you are pulling two shots of espresso into the same cup (which will likely overflow your average espresso cup) your caffeine intake per shot of espresso is 60 to 75mg. I don’t know of any portafilter basket that would let you get to 150mg in one pull, that would be a quadruple espresso.

Back 10+ years ago when I had my machine 21g baskets were all the rage, and I think I remember whispers of larger.

Yes, that used to be the case I think. The espresso world backed off of that in the last few years. Nowadays the average dose is trending lower. Possibly, half the reason is that a larger dose is more inefficient (i.e. it drops your extraction rate) and the other half is that coffee costs money and for coffee shops that operate at 5-10% margins, 14g doses (standard Italian double espresso) vs 21g (the ‘third wave’ dose up till a few years ago) does make a meaningful difference in whether the store is under water or not. I think it’s settling around 16-18g.

Operating margins, not gross margins right? Would you happen to know what's a "typical" wholesale cost (i.e. to the café) for third-wave beans?

Yes. James Hoffmann on YouTube talks more about the margins of coffee business if you'd like to learn more, that's where my knowledge comes from for the most part.

I just went an measured, about 18g of finely ground coffee fit into my 'double' espresso shot... However I could easily power through 5 of those a day.

I further fell from grace when I started packing as much as possible into a massive percolator for rocket fuel by the filled cup.

But you are right, 3 shots is probably not that much caffeine. It's somewhat hard to get good numbers on it.

Yes, and honestly you’re doing fine, because your 3 pulls of espresso is about the same as a Starbucks venti latte at 180-190mg. I think in Europe the caffeine content is even higher at something like 225mg for the same latte.

If you really, and I mean really want to have a go at the rocket fuel territory, you can do what many cafes in Istanbul now offer: Turkish coffee… at a regular coffee size. I think it takes about 150g of ground coffee per cup. That’s like pulling repeated shots of espresso till you fill a regular mug, except Turkish coffee is finer ground so has more caffeine than your average espresso per gram of coffee in.

Obviously, don’t try this if you have any medical conditions or sensitivity to caffeine, but this is what some Turks often drink on their days off.

I always start the day splitting a 12 cup pot with my husband, frequently we make more later in the morning. It's really nothing if you are habituated to it and not especially caffeine sensitive. I know many other similarly heavy coffee drinkers.

You drink six cups of coffee in something like a three hour period? Seems like some kind of addiction.

What do you gain from that?

It tastes good, especially with breakfast food, wakes me up a bit, and is hydrating. I experience no negatives, and nothing in particular happens to me if I skip it either. It seems implausible to frame as an addiction unless you start from the preconception that caffeine must be a vice.

And according to this article, and others, I apparently gain various health benefits from my preferred beverage to boot :)

If it's spaced out well, it should be fine. It might make one feel a bit hot/irritable though.

Often caffeine tablets are sold as 200mg, so it's just two of those. (One bottle of tablets I have says don't exceed 5 pills in 24 hours - 1 gram!)

Be careful with caffeine supplements such as pills and (especially) powders. Overdosing is far too easy and can be a substantial health risk, even deadly - https://www.health.com/nutrition/caffeine-powder-overdose

Eight ounce cups are quite small. For reference, at Starbucks it’s called a “short.”

I know lots of people in my office will drink two 16 oz cups a day, which is equivalent.

> two 16 oz cups a day

Put another way, That’s two pints of beer. That’s a lot of coffee to me.

It is, especially for folks with health conditions or smaller body types.

Cherry picking studies (mostly funded by producers) means never having to admit your vices are a problem.

Not really. My very boring drip coffee machine doesn't even have a notch below 4 cups.

I could be wrong, but I think the “cups” on a coffee maker are 4oz each

You’re right. 4-5 “cups” of 8 ounces is 2 - 2.5 pint beer glasses (they are 16 oz each).

I hope not. I worked in the coffee industry and consumed 10-20 shots of espresso a day. Sometimes more.

Seems average for a coffee-drinking office worker. One for breakfast, one for lunch and one between each major meal (assuming 100mg per cup which would be normal for a middle-roast brew coffee).

But as others have mentioned, it’s hard to control for other factors.

I imagine 300+ mg of caffeine is also associated with a less sedentary lifestyle, for example.

Excess looks like this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UGtKGX8B9hU

I see there chicken/egg problem.

Is it coffee beneficial for your health or is it people with good health/genes and with tollarance to coffeine drink more coffee?

Anything that modifies sleep is not healthy.

Summer time is not healthy?

Definitely not healthy.

Tell that to my Mom - she drinks coffee in the morning to wake up and coffee before she goes to bed to help her sleep. She's one step off Put The Lime In The Coconut.

4-5 cups seems about right. I typically ingest about 8 cups of coffee throughout the day. That's a close-to-full pot of coffee for me. As some have mentioned, "cups" the measurement does not necessarily equate to "cup" a receptacle. I only say this because, one or two coffees brings me to life in the morning. After that, I start to basically sustain a prolonged professional panic attack of concentrated anxiety that is more or less a reason to not schedule meetings with me in the afternoon.

That is to say, a cup from say, Starbucks would come in the following sizes:

Demi: 3oz

Short: 8oz

Tall: 12oz

Grande: 16oz

Venti: 20 oz

Trenta: 31 oz

In the US, to my knowledge: 1 cup : 8oz : 16 tbsp.

Typically, when I make 8 cups of coffee in my coffee pot, I use 6 level tablespoons of coffee grounds, medium, medium-coarse-ish. It literally doesn't matter. You swing from Turkish coffee to Cowboy coffee, the importance is that you have a consistent way to produce your desired grind. Ground coffee is unacceptable, because it oxidizes too quickly since it all tends to come in bags that nobody ever seals those correctly, and mostly because if you drink coffee, you're already lazy in the morning.

As many in the scientific community are familiar, the US is one of the last holdovers of the imperial system.

What most do not know, is that there is even significant difference between how the US and UK measure a tbsp for instance.

US: 14.8 ml for tsbp UK: 15.0 ml for tbsp

If you're making coffee, that's a huge difference.

Example: My ideal ratio is about 6 US tbsp : 8 cups of water.

That's not for flavor – so much that, in the morning, my brain literally does not care about mathematics or physics or cooking or anything really – I want to dump an exact amount of water, pour an exact amount of coffee and have a consistent cup that I can then slowly improve upon if I have a satisfactory cup of coffee.

The difference between US and UK would be 6 * 14.8 and 6 * 15.0 = 88.8 ml vs 90.0 ml.

You might say, that is a negligible difference!

HOW DARE YOU. THIS IS COOKING. THIS IS TASTE. THIS IS CHEMISTRY, THIS IS SCIENCE. THIS IS MATH. TO ERR IS HUMAN, TO FORGIVE IS DIVINE, BUT TO NOT CARE IS DEMONIC.

Less confrontational: That's just for one measurement of say grounds or fluid. The conversion of difference in measurement can be applied to both grounds and water.

So let's just convert tbsp by itself between UK and US.

6 tbsp of level coffee grounds. 96 tbsp of water, at whatever quality Los Angeles tap water is, which is terrible.

6:96 = 0.0625

This is an arbitrary ratio which means absolutely nothing, but let's compare it to the UK version.

So we know that UK tbsp is slightly larger. Exactly (15.0/14.8) ~ 10%?

Okay, so that would be... (15.0/14.8) 6 = 6.08108108108 (15.0/14.8) * 96 = 97.2972972973

So notice, when you take the ratio, it is exactly the same. The terms cancel out, but you are making more coffee. This stuff tends to matter more, at higher altitudes or various humidity. Essentially, water is the most sensitive medium for variation in boiling and quality control. This may seem trivial, in my personal experience – I'd rather have too little caffeine than too much.

Basically, I want exactly two cups to be satisfactory. It has more to do with the experience of drinking coffee and taste than the actual 'boost'. Programmers or statisicians, data scientists, machine learning engineers will understand – You'd rather have just 2 of something, than to round up to 3. Nobody pours 2~3 cups of coffee. Either they are satisfied with 2, or they're chugging 3.

In whatever-programming, we call this the domain of non-linear real arithmetic as a decidable language. As in, I decide to drink more coffee than not.

As someone who started drinking coffee heavily since a teenager to offset the fact that I have never been a morning person and never will be, while also trying balance professionalism towards working in different timezones where clients prefer to start their day with a meeting...

Yeah, 1-2 cups of coffee. 8oz exactly. I have Ikea mugs. Those are 8oz. One to install my brain, another to calm it down. The second-order effects of caffeine are not unsubtle.

Anything more? I am bull-riding an anxiety trip of wanting to simultaneously produce Berlin techno and the latest innovation in machine learning. Your Mileage May Vary.

For true scientific intuition and experimental honesty, observe the following video detailing what occurs when you drink a full jar of coffee:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wpWVk3h2SA8

> What most do not know, is that there is even significant difference between how the US and UK measure a tbsp for instance.

> US: 14.8 ml for tsbp UK: 15.0 ml for tbsp

Most serious coffee brewers I know have kitchen scales, weigh their input and output in grams (or ounces, maybe), and stick to their preferred ratio.

Measuring in tablespoons sounds awfully tedious.

We really should ban paywalled articles on HN.

where is the "archive" link?!

https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome (also exists for firefox)

uBlock Origin > disable JavaScript

Problem solved.

coffee is cringe

I honestly hate the "Haha I NEED my coffee isn't my addiction so quirky haha?" thing some people have. And the same as weed addicts they constantly feel the need to justify their addiction it really irritates me.

i quit smoking. i reduced drinking down to 1-3 a week on weekends, maybe 2-3 weekends a month.

i quit soda. i quit energy drinks.

i work 30-50 hours a week, i take care of a house, a child, two pets, im aging and slowing down.

i can go without coffee if need be. and i have for mobths after having a spell of anxiety due to some life events. but theres a definite effect of doing without.

sorry to annoy you, and sorry to make light of a completely normal, heavily socialized consumption habit.

im certain you have zero vices and are perfect and never annoy anyone.

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