Americans should drink more coffee | Hacker News Reader

Americans should drink more coffee

washingtonpost.com

43 pointsulysses57 comments

Open articleView on HN

Is it possible to see how much if any money was given to the committee from the coffee industry?

http://www.health.gov/dietaryguidelines/committee/#members

Exactly my thoughts. I am surprised that they aren't recommending K-Cups.

I wouldn't be surprised to find some hidden text on the page - Drink More Ovaltine

You get my vote for the greatest comment ever written.

Was my first thought, too, after reading about the link between the sugar industry and those early sugar studies.

Seems to me like the scientific community should be overly open about its sources of funding, conflicts of interest, etc if it wants to maintain public trust going forward.

It is. Typically if you publish in a respected and peer reviewed journal, you are required to disclose sources of funding in the article. Especially if those sources include for-profit companies, you're in for a world of hurt if you don't.

But the "scientific community", so far as such a thing exists, can't censure news reports, government reports, or corporate reports that claim "X is true because science". It also cannot stop someone from publishing a "scientific" journal.

"Science" is not a Trade Mark, and scientists cannot solve for clueless consumers who believe everything if you say "because science!" Especially when those same consumers fail to fund / pay attention in quality post-secondary science education.

>it's unlikely to do anything other than make you more alert and awake.

I find that extremely hard to believe.

If I drink 5 cups of coffee per day I get heart palpitations, an upset stomach, and am extremely irritable in general. The same goes for my significant other.

I actually went to a heart specialist and wore a heart monitor for 48 hours last year because I was having an irregular heartbeat and would black-out occasionally after jumping up out of a chair. The diagnosis? I'm fine. I just need to ingest less caffeine.

I think I'll stick with my one cup per day, below average amount.

It's just enough to wake up me, keep me alert, without any of the negative effects that caffeine brings with it.

OTOH:

http://www.inc.com/travis-bradberry/caffeine-the-silent-kill...

Claims: caffeine only improves mental performance in those habituated to caffeine, triggers body chemistry leaning towards fight/flight responses, disrupts sleep

None of this is necessarily at odds with the WaPo article, which appears to mostly claim that there are no increased mortality/chronic disease risks associated with high coffee consumption (and some decreased risk of diabetes/cardiovascular risk?).

Disrupted sleep has terrible effects. I don't see how these ideas can coexist.

This should be taken with a huge grain of salt: The article pointed is dated Feb 2015 but see all these articles:

[1] from September 2014

[2] from Feb 2015

[3] from September 2014

[6] : From August _2012_

All from this "Dr. Travis ..." . They all quote "New research from Johns Hopkins Medical School" , without ever giving the source of that research. If you google a bit for it you will find some information from Johns Hopkins University[4] : "Caffeine Has Positive Effect on Memory"; some study [5] from The Johns Hopkins Precursors Study in 2002 (so hardly "new") discuss about coffee, but "these associations were not statistically significant". You will notice that from August 2012 to February 2015, it was always "New research"

In conclusion, this LinkedIn blog post (from which all articles copy/paste from) lacks a lot of sources, especially if written by someone who holds a dual Ph.D. in clinical and industrial-organizational psychology (according to his Forbes personal page).

[1] http://www.ihcus.com/2014/09/11/the-effects-of-coffee- helpful-or-harmful/

[2]http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-how-drinking-one-cup-of...

[3] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140908162020-50578967-caffe...

[4] http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/stories/caffeine_memory....

[5] http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=21133...

[6] : http://www.forbes.com/sites/travisbradberry/2012/08/21/caffe...

Ha, I just noticed a referenced story below this one:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/07/14/a...

Me too!

I used to hunt for freshly and properly roasted quality beans, and grind them myself before each brew, and all that.

What I have come to this this: few coffees compare to Nescafe Gold a.k.a. Taster's Choice.

Certainly nothing that you can order around town from places like ####bucks or whatever.

Those Nestle buggers have figured out how to make great testing freeze-dried coffee. And it's so consistent! I've drank the stuff under different names on different continents, and it's exactly the same. (Modulo minor variations like "blend" or "dark roast").

And it's so cheap and easy just to throw a teaspoon of brown powder into hot water. Why bother with anything else.

Whenever I happen to have a coffee somewhere (socially, since I'd never do such a thing by myself any more) I'm actually wishing that the damn slop was Nescafe Gold!

I feel the title of that article is misleading. From the article:

'"The markets where instant coffee is most popular tend to be the ones without a strong tradition of coffee drinking," Dana LaMendola, and industry analyst at Euromonitor, said in an interview. "It's basically an entry point."'

So it's not that people prefer one over the other, it's because they don't have much of a coffee culture and people don't really care about the quality of their coffee. Saying you prefer instant coffee to quality, roasted beans is like saying you prefer a prepackaged, microwavable dinner to a properly cooked meal.

Depending on who is cooking the meal... absolutely I'll take the microwave dinner!

Or, places with a "strong tradition of coffee drinking" are resistant to change independent of actual quality -- because coffee is ritualized -- and so tend not to prefer instant coffee even to cheap (in the quality rather than price sense) roasted beans.

That's ridiculous. Would you say the same about areas where people consume more microwaved dinners over cooked meals? That the people cooking their meals are just resistant to change?

> That the people cooking their meals are just resistant to change?

That's not what I said in the coffee case; I said that the preference differences between places with strong coffee traditions and those without may be partially due to the fact that having a strong tradition of coffee drinking includes a culture attached to the ritual of preparation.

I did not say that the people in an area that has a relatively strong preference for instant who individually do not are "just resistant to change".

That being said, you certainly might see something similar in regional distribution of preferences for prepackaged foods vs. freshly-prepared foods that aren't explained by other socioeconomic factors, though I'd expect that "food" is general enough that you it would be a very weak factor (though probably much stronger if you look at specific foods rather than "food" as a whole.)

When I still drank coffee, I preferred instant coffee because I could control the strength of it by merely adding more than was intended to the water. No messing around with expresso. Coffee was always a means to an end for me though, that end being caffeine.

I've since switched to caffeinated gum. Probably more expensive if I ran the numbers, but way more convenient and I burn my mouth less now.

It's not a preference over all of them. It's that most makers of coffee do it as an afterthought and a few particular brands of instant beat that quality level easily. Also they don't like Starbucks.

Sure, there are terrible beans out there that may be worse than instant coffee, just like there are terribly cooked meals out there worse than microwaved dinners. Parent stated "What I have come to this this: few coffees compare to Nescafe Gold a.k.a. Taster's Choice." which is an absurd statement. Most beans you get from even Starbucks (as long as they are fresh and suite your tastes [light, dark, etc]) will be way better than the instant stuff, let alone the stuff you can get from the thousands of other coffee roasters around the country.

"few coffees compare" I might rate as being about one standard deviation above the average fresh coffee, 85th percentile. It's not an expert opinion saying it's in the top five coffees in the entire world.

So the claim is that an exceptional premade food could manage to be unexceptional-but-good among freshly cooked foods.

I don't find that absurd.

Having grown up with Moccona freeze dried coffee in Australia, I would rank it ahead of drip or plunger coffee in most cases, but decent coffee prepared properly using an espresso machine is far ahead. There's just no comparison.

It's weird that the panel didn't take into account the harmful effects of disrupted sleep patterns. They did note a concern about the extra calories from milk and sugar added to coffee.

I was just debating whether to go out for coffee now, or in an hour. Now it is!

Most people I work with splash a lot of cream and sugar in their coffee - probably hurts the study.

I decided to give up caffeine. I used to drink a lot of tea. I thought maybe it was making me anxious + using caffeine as a stimulant is a zero-sum game.

You don't have to necessarily give up tea because you've given up caffeine. There are lots of no-caffeine teas out there (many of which are quite good).

I've (largely) given up caffeine as well, but I still enjoy a warm cup of tea in the morning, especially in winter. :)

Yeah I drink a thing called 'barley cup' its grand!

I hear you. After not consuming any caffeine for around five years, I ordered a small caffeinated beverage to sip on while I watched X-Men: Days of Future Past in the theater. That turned out to be one of the most stressful moviegoing experiences I can remember. The movie was pretty extreme, but I was talking my buddy's ear off during the more exciting scenes and felt like I couldn't stop thinking and just enjoy the show. I walked out feeling pretty raw and chuckling at the thought of the caffeine as a light indulgence that I had thought would just remind me of my younger days. I'm still not dead set against caffeine for everybody or anything, but I doubt I'll drink it again by choice.

Zero sum is not necessarily a bad thing, though.

Is it possible to get these supposed benefits from coffee if it's decaf?

The research is quite focused on caffeine but mentions some benefit from decaf:

http://health.gov/dietaryguidelines/2015-scientific-report/1...

From the link:

"Coffee consumption was associated with reduced risk of total mortality (3-4% lower mortality with 1 cup/day), especially cardiovascular mortality" "Decaffeinated coffee consumption was associated with a lower risk of death"

This makes it sound like coffee consumption helps and decaf consumption helps more when it comes to mortality risks.

Also, if I'm reading it right, that link says unfiltered caffeinated increases LDL blood levels, which I'm given to understand is bad.

It sounds like decaf is better...

I read "Decaffeinated coffee consumption was associated with a lower risk of death" to mean that they lack sufficient data to quantify it, not as a comparison to caffeinated.

If you are someone that doesn't eat many vegetables or take vitamins, I can see why coffee would be recommended. It does contain a very high amount of flavanols antioxydants... I'm not a big fan of the caffeine however.

Caffeine is a surprisingly benign "drug" (especially since it appears to have evolved as a natural insecticide).

Personally, I'm not a "fan" of taking vitamins.

Yes. Isn't there no evidence in favour of taking vitamin supplement? And recently mounting evidence that in fact it may be harmful if anything?

This world is clearly not meant for those of us who dislike coffee :-(

And alcohol. I think I'll just say I'm a Muslim or something.

Tomorrow there will be a study that says coffee is poison, and the next day it will be a miracle cure. It's difficult to take these arguments seriously when they're countered almost daily.

Life is about taking calculated risks. I prefer the moderation route.

According to the Daily Mail, it's currently 8 to 2 in favor of coffee preventing cancer - http://kill-or-cure.herokuapp.com/a-z/c#term133

(Chocolate on the other hand is 2:0 in favor of prevention - http://kill-or-cure.herokuapp.com/a-z/c#term121)

The whole "they'll keep saying the opposite thing anyway" argument is tired. Sure, there have been prominent reversals, but usually behind it is an industry lobby group, not science.

There have been studies attempting to show coffee is harmful for decades (basically, there seems to be a general suspicion that anything people enjoy is probably harmful), and the results have been consistently ambiguous or in favor of coffee.

If your sole purpose of drinking coffee is for the caffeine, caffeine pills are a great alternative. Sure there is a lot of negative stigmatism around pills in general, but they are significantly cheaper and more effective than drinking pure coffee.

It frustrates me that they never give the official name of the panel.

This article doesn't mention quantity in standard unit like ml and doesn't mention that coffee shouldn't be adulterated with pumps of sugars.

How many cups of coffee do people drink in Seattle and Vancouver, and is that linked to their longevity?

Vancouver reporting in! Consumption is quite high from my anecdotal experience. I personally consume ~3-6 cups a day. I work in the tech field up here and that seems to be pretty standard.

And you're 106 years old?

And since the tech industry is known for its high concentration of workers productive well into their later decades... ;)

Does this 3 cups is of expresso, filtered, or the watery stuff common in USA?

Imagine you're being downvoted for the watery stuff from the USA part. Careful, you're offending those who take their coffee seriously. I prefer German or Italian, personally. Coffee in France is too bitter. Something happens (even to Italian coffee) as it crosses the channel into the UK that sucks the taste out of it, and puts it into tea. I consider standard-fare American coffee a torture technique. Worst coffee I ever experienced was in Israel. But all of these are my personal taste. Opinions will differ as much as there are stars in the sky, grains of sand on the beach. And every opinion is correct, and valid. Because while some of us are similar, none of us are the same.

If you're going to inadvertently dis' someone else's choice, make your intent known - i.e. point out that it's just your opinion. Don't give it that superiority-stance.

If the drip coffee coming out of the US these days (think: Blue Bottle) is "watery" then I'll take it with extra water, thanks. Just got a Blue Bottle down the road here in Tokyo, and if you can get over the 450 yen pricetag and 90 minute lineup then you are rewarded with a delicious cup of Joe.

3 cups of espresso would be a fantastic amount of coffee. You'd actually have a medical condition of you drank that much espresso every day:

~64 mg caffeine / ounce in espresso

64 mg/ounce * 8 ounces * 3 = 1536 mg

From wikipedia: "Consumption of 1000–1500 mg per day is associated with a condition known as caffeinism."

Cut with a top shelf rum to counteract this condition. Mt Gay Black Barrel, Goslings, or Zaya to suggest a few.

I imagine when most people say 'a cup of espresso' they're thinking of a demitasse of the stuff, not using '1 cup' in the unit-of-volume sense (which'd be an ~octuple espresso)

"Three cups of espresso" means "three times 25-30 ml fluid (1 ounce)", not "three large 8 ounce-cups that you fill with espresso-strength coffee". So, three espressi remains below 200 mg caffiene.

Surprising fact: a normal cup of drip coffee (8 oz) typically contains more caffeine than a normal cup of espresso (1 oz). For example, see http://coffeechemistry.com/caffeine/caffeine-content-in-espr...

That might be kind of tough. We're already taking it via IV.

Not so healthy with cream and sugar...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com