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Comment by Bridged7756 | Hacker News Reader

I love coffee. It's good for you, it smells and tastes so good. It wakes you up, and prevents sleepiness after meals. Its stimulant nature is a plus, but not necessarily the main thing.

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I would be very cautious about any conclusions regarding its health benefits or detriments. Nutrition research is notoriously difficult to replicate or show causal links in humans engaging with the real world.

Texas A&M also has a coffee research center dedicated to promoting and protecting global coffee trade and consumption so… yeah.

Sure, but it's also the best we got.

Unfortunately the most flavorful methods (espresso, french press, moka) also raise your cholesterol. So sadly, no, coffee is not universally "good for you". Filtered coffee methods are though, as the filter absorbs the oils.

Which is why Italians and Greeks famously all die young of heart disease

Always so cute how fellow coffee lovers will loudly boast the health benefits of coffee, but when you add an asterisk they will see it as a personal attack and respond strongly :)

Coffee is not what defines your identity. It's fine to admit it isn't perfect.

My point is not that unfiltered coffee is good, I’m just saying that northern italians who eat dessert for breakfast, cook everything in lard, drink unfiltered coffee and even (gasp) sometimes smoke cigarettes are significantly healthier than Americans on every metric.

Not saying those things are necessarily good for you, I’m just saying we don’t seem to understand this stuff very well

Probably because they don't consume gobs of HFCS and ultra-processed foods, don't take the car for every single thing[0], and have obesity/overweight rates that are 20-40% lower. A healthier work-life balance and concomitant lower cortisol and blood pressure also helps a lot.

If you compare Italians and Greeks to, say, Swedes and Dutchies, you'd get a much different picture.

[0] not entirely Americans their personal fault, their urban design isn't for walking around

>and even (gasp) sometimes smoke cigarettes are significantly healthier than Americans on every metric.

Not just "sometimes". Less these days, but when they were recognized as blue zones decades ago almost everybody smoked like chimneys.

I think it's easy to for many to miss the sarcasm. Not everyone is aware of the life expectancy of certain Mediterranean groups.

The slight cholesterol boost from those doesn't matter... It's like saying that a banana is radioactive. Let me guess, it's bad to eat fat aswell?

There are far worse foods that spike your cholesterol, irrelevant point you've made

Sorry brother but the worry around cholesterol - especially in the context of the US - is not stemming from people drinking too much coffee. If you have high cholesterol there are 15 other things you should probably be cutting down on. This is similar to people who tell people to watch the sugar content in their fruit intake. No ones getting obese off fruit, the benefits outweigh the negatives tenfold.

While what you say is true, people carrying extra weight are often prediabetic and should be watching sugar/carb intake in the morning when blood glucose levels are already rising without food. That also happens to be one of the most popular times of day to consume fruit, which is why choosing a fruit with a lower glycemic index (or load) at breakfast is importance.

Paper filters give you massive amounts of microplastics

If something has several clear positive effects, and a possible small, arguably irrelevant, negative effect, most people will agree that yes, it's good for you.

It's like trying to argue that running may have a negative effect on some people's meniscus under some specific circumstances. That doesn't negate the generalization "running is good for you".

Pour over is flavorful and none of the fat

The dose makes the poison.

Even caffeine has an LD50!

But filtered coffee is the most flavorful! No other method extracts the subtle nuances as well! P.s. I know it's subjective, just cringe on this claim of "the most flavorful" starting with espresso. :)

Yep, every method brings out a different nuance of coffee flavor, and any true coffee snob will likely own half a dozen or more items for brewing coffee.

> So sadly, no, coffee is not universally "good for you".

Got a citation on that statement? Are we talking significant amounts? How much unfiltered coffee is too much?

That's why I moved to decaf. Love coffee, caffeine doesn't like me.

I am definitely going to do this as I age, I just don't need the stimulant effects as much anymore. That said, the ritual of getting coffee and sipping on something warm in the morning is really important to starting my day right.

Sadly, I can't. I tried all the decaf beans in my area and even some fancy online roastery specialized only in decaf beans, and they all tasted like ass, compared to their caffeinated cousins. So much money wasted trying to find good tasting decaf beans.

Not sure what the decaffeination process does, but it definitely does not preserve the taste of the "untouched" beans. Are my tastebuds too sensitive?

FYI since many people don't know: Decaf isn't zero, it can still be several percentage points. In the US decaf is supposed to be under 3% of regular coffee but it's not commonly tested or enforced, so many types of decaf can be quite a bit higher. Several big cups of decaf can approach the caffeine content of one regular cup.

> Several big cups of decaf can approach the caffeine content of one regular cup

Do you have a source for this? Because it doesn't sound right to me. And also, I live in a coffee producing company, work adjacent to the coffee industry, and had a long conversation with someone planning to set up a business exporting green beans to the US, and their beans were getting tested to an extreme degree and being rejected for a few ppm over on certain things.

I have heard the 3% rule but fyi it's 1% in the EU and since there's actually not that many large scale decaffeination factories in the world, as far as I know they all target the EU level.

If you buy small batch, large batch, or somewhere in between it's probably been processed in one of these few large factories.

Just Wikipedia. It cites two studies that found values of 8-13 mg and 3-32 mg per decaf cup, compared to regular which is 95-200. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decaffeination

The linked Wikipedia "study" is this science daily article:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/10/061012185602.h...

And that article links back to this UFL press release. I've clicked every link I can find and there's not an actual, published study to be found anywhere:

https://archive.news.ufl.edu/articles/2006/10/uf-experts-dec...

But even if there was, is a study from 20 years ago still relevant?

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