Study links coffee consumption to metabolic health and sex hormones
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Maybe if you're deep in working in this research space it could help generate hypotheses for more meaningful research? But "we cross sectionally compared two groups with different behaviors and found they were different" is not really a result.
I'm curious why they don't mention tea actually, are they suggesting it's not the caffeine that's doing it?
granted recent studies showed decaf coffee has some benefits itself, so it could be some of the other compounds present in coffee, but a discussion of this would be useful
Tea, as well as caffeine, has other compounds that are calming.
And yes, there are plenty of other compounds in coffee, as well as purely psychological effects.
I don't know if it's the word "addicts" that maybe doesn't have to be a negative, or if it's not the right word at all for "functional addicts", but I feel like the "addiction" people have to coffee is much more behavioral than chemical (although there is physiological withdrawal symptoms too), compared to other "harder" drugs like cocaine or heroin. The clear negative effects from long-term use is also a lot much evidence with one side of these, coffee not so much.
Not sure you have to cut back on something that you really enjoy, so much that you wanna do it every day, even if you get cranky when someone (sometimes you) ruin this ceremony for you. Why would you cut back when the biggest negative is spending 10-20EUR a month on some nice coffee you can consume every single morning?
>you wanna do it every day, even if you get cranky when someone (sometimes you) ruin this ceremony for you
This is addicted behavior; the bar is far lower than most people use the word for.
The term addiction is commonly used to describe something else though.
Addiction for the most part is life shattering and not about 'having headache for a few days when not drinking coffee'.
Sure, withdrawal effects are a criteria for substance use disorder and I guess you could construct a mild disorder by finding some other criteria.
But nobody becomes homeless because of coffee consumption, nobody loses they job or friends because of it, nobody smokes or injects caffeine to have a greater effect.
You can call people drinking coffee addicted, but that only works for the effect because addiction is a terrible disorder, not because coffee consumption is that terrible.
Btw: I consume products that contain caffeine very rarely (1 per month maybe).
Maybe you can count people getting cancer or burning their houses down as the life shattering consequences. But I'd argue this has less to do with the addiction to nicotine and more to do how nicotine is usually consumed. Plus the younger generation seems to have abandoned smoking and are getting their nicotine from vaping or Zyn instead.
The only thing that I know is that I know nothing but I will like to respectfully present my points
Couldn't the same arguments that you used could be used, for say, phone addiction and so many other under-focused addictions as well.
There is more nuance to it that I'd like to explore:
Is the dependency of anything whether good or bad not something worth discussing more deeply into. Could it perhaps also say just a few things about our society that workers feel so overworked that they have to resort to using coffee in order to tolerate the amount of work?
I don't drink coffee personally, do I get cranky? Of course but I don't attribute that crankiness to my lack of coffee. Life has its ups and downs but suppose a down comes just after you wanted to quit coffee, you might attribute your responses to how you stopped drinking coffee, you would feel like coffee was helping you and now you stopped it and you are missing out on something. You must again use coffee!
My main point is: How much is coffee really helping you and how much is the fear of absence of coffee as if you are losing out on something so precious and that many can't live their life without it when in reality many people live just fine without drinking coffee as well and all the ways our minds folds our thinking into wanting it again. just one more time, trust me bro. Today I had a lot of work from my boss or I feel so stressed, nothing like a cup of coffee. Just one more time.
I feel as if the excuse can work in our minds because at that point, our minds are tired, it just wants to fix itself and we don't think too rationally about it. You might even think what's the harm? but the harms is that the cycle continues and I will try to list some of the harms in the end of the comment from another HN commenter (@bossyTeacher) who puts it better than I can :-)
- High heart rate and blood pressure
- Increased risk of arrhtymia
- Less deep sleep
- Disruption to your cortisol level dynamics
(I have shared some negative effects of it, also if coffee impacts your sleep, one has to wonder that there are people willing to pay thousands of dollars to improve their sleep, the question seems to me how much do you think your deep sleep is worth over the long term?)
As such, I believe that there's more nuance to the whole thing.
To me, my personal opinion is that I don't want my self control resource to focus on the task of coffee consumption and keeping it in check. I sometimes drink soft drinks like diet coke just because I would have some friction (which well online shopping is actually ironically* making it less when I would want the friction to be more actually but still!), I know that with coffee, I might not be able to resist the temptation of having coffee at home and then drinking it a bit too much. It happens to the best of us, It's alright but something worth thinking about.
Self control is like a resource in terms of how precious it is, you have a finite amount of self control (IMO). As such, I would like to just not think about coffee so much in life and live my life :-)
(I think I might prefer less diet coke as well and to get to lemonade and other natural drinks actually, personally I like lemonade as well but even the mere friction of 2 minutes making one has sometimes made me stop as I feel like its a task. I am thinking if I really must, someday I would try to make Lemonade in huge container and just drink from it throughout the day.)
Caffeine causes increased locomotor activity. It's possible that the apparent benefits of coffee may occur because it causes drinkers to move around more (exercise). Other drugs also do this, but usually with more side-effects. Reductions in all-cause mortality associated with coffee consumption are broadly distributed across cardiovascular disease, cancer, which qualitatively resemble the benefits of exercise. Increased testosterone is also an effect of regular exercise:
https://journals.bioscientifica.com/ec/article/6/5/306/35211...
Example from 2009: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2009/apr/30/alcohol-life...
Tobacco stated off being marketed as a botanical medicine. We could say similar things about cocaine and other harder drugs as well.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7247455/
Meat mostly got a bad wrap due to its association with fat. Fat got a bad wrap, because the sugar industry paid off researches to point the finger and fat instead of sugar as the cause of heart disease. We’re still paying the price for this one.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074...
There are also the vegans who have made it their life’s mission to try to vilify meat, so that’s kind of the same thing, but from the opposite direction.
These things have happened in other industries. It’s just that many of those were impactful enough that they could only keep up the ruse for so long. Caffeine has a more mild effect, so it’s less likely that it will end up like cocaine or tabacco.
Took me 2 weeks to stop craving coffee. And about a month until I started to feel right.
I still have the occasional coffee but don't drink it every day. I like it this way.
I miss it like I missed cigarettes after I quit those.
I've stopped a half dozen times, for around a month each time, but I found that I like the way my brain functions with coffee. The risk of a headache seems like a net win for me, in the grand scheme, especially since I try to do what I can to reduce the risk of dementia and Alzheimers.
I like that I can just get up and go do something without having to get a coffee to stave off a headache and be fully functional.
Like I say I'm not t-total I just have a different relationship with coffee now, one where I'm in control and I can use it rather than needing it.
Personally, I stopped drinking caffeine when I was around 19 after I figured out it was the source of my chronic headaches (from withdrawal). I had to talk my dad out of taking me to a neurologist at one point in high school. My quality of life went up significantly after cutting caffeine and going through the week-long headache.
An example could be that they don’t like admitting how dependent they are on it to function. Reading between the lines, this is vibe I pick up most. Some others in the comments have stated this explicitly as true for them as well.
If you are asking in good faith (which I hope you do because its HN and we are curious people, aren't we!), I recommend looking at r/decaf for seeing people's experience that they are sharing regarding it.
Also upvoting @bossyTeacher comments and re-sharing the good points that they have made:
- High heart rate and blood pressure
- Increased risk of arrhtymia
- Less deep sleep
- Disruption to your cortisol level dynamics
- High heart rate and blood pressure
- Increased risk of arrhtymia
- Less deep sleep
- Disruption to your cortisol level dynamics
Whether you consider all of them not "bad" or worth the benefits is up to you. People also consider moderate consumption of alcohol worth its benefits.
Everyone has a different risk profile. Know the risks and choose as you please.
Maybe the general consumption went up over the years. I think around 200mg per day was considered safe? That would be around two European-sized drinks.
Whether or not the results are being taken seriously is another matter.
No, addiction is an uncontrolled dependence. If you FEEL dependent on a substance to function as an adult and you are UNABLE to control that dependence (can't quit on a whim for let's say 4 months) despite harm, you are addicted.
Regular coffee usage gradually stains and erodes your teeth at a minimum. At certain doses, you worse your sleep quality and increase heart rate and blood pressure.
The above look like negative effects to me.
It is perfectly fine to accept the consequences. The problem is when it's a dependency and you cannot control it. Like doing base jump, it's clearly risky but you can make an informed decision about accepting the risk. If you feel like you NEED to do it and can't stop for lets say 5 months, that's where it gets concerning.
Weirdly, I cannot copy text from that page. What am I doing wrong?
Regardless, here is the result summary:
> Higher coffee intake groups showed lower total and visceral fat and higher skeletal muscle mass, while BMI was comparable across groups. Inverse correlations were observed between coffee intake and circulating branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs) in both sexes. In men, higher coffee intake correlated with a more favourable glucose-insulin profile. Multivariable-adjusted models revealed a distinct hormonal pattern: positive associations with total testosterone (β = +0.29 nmol/L per cup/day), bioavailable testosterone, and sex hormone-binding globulin (SHBG), alongside inverse associations with free testosterone and the free androgen index (FAI). In women, hormonal associations were more limited, with positive associations for SHBG and inverse associations for free testosterone and FAI.
Really, this will have no meaningful impact on your health. It is widely discussed by TRT (testosterone replacement therapy) doctors that supplements that can increase your total test by 100ng/dL will have no meaningful impact. Literally, you need to drink 12 cups of coffee per day to get a ~100ng/dL improvement. You are going to have a lot of second order effects from drinking 12 cups of coffee per day! I would never recommend it.
Why are coffee cups smaller than cups?
Maybe I’m just slow, but it makes doing the mental math a lot more difficult than it needs to be. Maybe I just need more coffee.
Here is a quote that I found:
> For most healthy adults, up to 400 milligrams of caffeine a day—about four 8-ounce cups of brewed coffee or 10 cans of cola—is considered safe and not linked to negative health effects, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
I did not notice any change between these two extremes.
The reason to prefer coffee is that it tastes less aggressive than those I think
Meanwhile in Asia beans are considered sweet bc their food isn't overloaded with sugar.
Coffee has a very strong taste (even without sugar). Stronger than anything on the list. I'd wager that the reason some people add a lot of sugar is to make up for that strong taste.
5 hour energy drinks have almost no sugar. Much milder taste than coffee.
> Meanwhile in Asia beans are considered sweet bc their food isn't overloaded with sugar.
Red bean paste?
So I'm guessing you could get the same boost from exercise, probably moreso.
Anything that elevates the heart rate for a bit is generally good for humans.
For one, caffeine is a known adenosine antagonist. The effects of adenosine is described as "drowsiness" or "relaxed".
> However, as this was an observational study, the findings demonstrate associations rather than cause-and-effect relationships.
More: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_cau...