Coffee drinkers have much lower risk of bowel cancer recurrence, study finds | Hacker News Reader

Coffee drinkers have much lower risk of bowel cancer recurrence, study finds

theguardian.com

20 pointssandebert10 comments

The reverse explanation (bowel cancer recurrence -> decreased coffee consumption) should be kept in mind.

There have been similar findings about caffeine and miscarriage, for instance, with higher caffeine intake associated with greater miscarriage risk. Then it was found that women who eventually miscarried are less likely to get morning sickness, and therefore less likely to feel nauseous from drinking coffee, and therefore drink more of it.

A similar causal path might be going on.

I'm curious about the numbers reported by the researchers that led to those results. Do you have any references to those studies you can share?

About miscarriage and caffeine? Unfortunately it's been awhile since I looked into it, due to our own issues with miscarriage. I did a quick look to find what I was thinking of and couldn't find it offhand only because there were so many studies to wade through. The study I was thinking looked at nausea timing and changes in consumption of caffeine, and found that the risk for miscarriage associated with caffeine was mediated by nausea, but specifically by the tendency for women without miscarriage to decrease their caffeine intake after morning sickness occurring when it usually does. Nausea later in pregnancy didn't seem to be related to miscarriage risk, nor did caffeine intake.

It looks like there are various studies coming to different conclusions about this though so maybe that was just one of many:

https://academic.oup.com/ije/article/52/1/165/6605011?login=...

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00029...

Do you know how many of these articles plague the internet? Writing an article headline that implies correlation is causation should mean a death sentence for the author or operator of the AI that wrote the clickbait article. Apply the same rule to "content based marketing".

Presumably this is because coffee in the morning quickly makes you need to use the toilet?

Yeah, it might not be inherently obvious, but imho flushing toxins out of the bowels faster rather than letting things sit in there for days is the beneficial effect more so than any compound in coffee doing work on carcinogens or otherwise.

Could it be due to higher MCT fatty acids consumption via having heavy cream with coffee every now and then?

Is it the coffee, or is it that heavy coffee drinkers are employed white collar professionals with good genes who do better on just about every measure?

Not sure why this is downvoted other than the tone. It’s called “Healthy User Bias”. The article even stated that this study was only correlative and that subjects were at less risk of any cause of death.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Healthy_user_bias

But they are at higher risk of high blood pressure and other issues.

So, I’m not sure this kind of reporting is meaningful.

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