Name: Josie
Current Event Posting Number: 4
Topic: Health
Title of Article: Coffee Drinkers May Live Longer
Author: Tara Parker-Pope
Publication Name: New York Times
Date of Publication: May 14, 2012
Length of Article: 10 paragraphs, 2 pages
A recent study shows that drinking more coffee is linked to having a lower risk of dying of a variety of diseases. The study was written and investigated by Neal D. Freedman from the National Institute of Health and was published in The New England Journal of Medicine. Their exact findings were taken from surveying 229,199 men and 173,141 women aging 50-71 years old. This made it the largest study ever done on the relationship between coffee consumption and health. The people they surveyed were from AARP and they followed them from 1995 to 2008, and by that point 52,000 had died. Although coffee is a stimulant that can increase heart rate and blood pressure temporarily, it also has many unique compounds and antioxidants that could be beneficial to health. Researchers learned that the more coffee a person consumed, the less likely he or she was likely to die from a myriad of health problems including diabetes, heart diseases, respiratory diseases, strokes and infections. A problem that arose when conducting this experiment was that the regular coffee drinkers in the group were also more likely to be smokers, eat more red meat and fewer fruits and vegetables, exercise less, and drink more alcohol. This would sway the results in that it would make it seem as though the people who drank more coffee were less healthy and at a higher risk for diseases. Once researchers controlled for those risks, the data showed that coffee was in fact beneficial to health. Freedman cautioned that the findings were only observational, and that there was an association between coffee consumption and lower risk for disease but they do not know that coffee will lead to better health. Drinking coffee has been considered a risky thing to do for a long time, but these findings provide reassurance for coffee drinkers that this is not the case. During the 14-year study they discovered that the risk of dying was about 10% less for men and 15% less for women who drank from 2-6 cups of coffee a day. The next step the researchers plan on taking is to learn more about the 1,000+ different types of compounds in coffee and to see which ones are causing a beneficial affect. Scientists believe that it could be either one, or a mixture of these compounds that could affect health. They want to discover this more because they want to see if they could possibly use these compounds in new medicines to help treat patients with heart or respiratory disease for example.
Neal D. Freeman and his team from the National Institute of Health published a study that shows that coffee can have beneficial health effects. The study included 229,199 Men and 173,141 Women aged 50-71 under the AARP health care program from the years of 1995 to 2008. Coffee is usually considered to raise blood pressure and heart rate temporarily, but is has been found that drinking coffee on a daily basis can reduce the risk of heart disease, respiratory disease, stroke and diabetes. The problem with the study was that the people who did drink this copious amount of coffee (2-6 cups) everyday also smoked more, drank more, ate more red meat and exercised less; this would skew the results. After compensating for these factors in the data, Neal and his team found that coffee does indeed have beneficial health effects; it reduces the risk of death by disease by 10% for men and 15% for women.
ReplyDeleteThey are not sure whether this is caused by one individual chemical in the coffee or by the mixture of the 1000+ different compounds found in coffee.
Because coffee has a plethora of compounds and antioxidants, it has be found to increase a person's lifespan, notes scientists. From the largest study ever concerning coffee and humans, it has been realized that coffee fights deadly diseases such as heart attacks. Though this is happy news for coffee addicts around the world, researcher Neal Freeman notes that these findings are preliminary, and restraint should still be practiced. However, for Freeman and his team, this discovery may pave the way to finding a drug or a cure to the deadly diseases they claim that coffee can fight.
ReplyDeleteIt is accepted worldwide that coffee is detrimental, but this study seems to prove otherwise. Involving a staggering 229,199 men and 173,141 women, scientists looked for possible beneficial side effects to coffee. The study lasted from 1995 to 2008, making it one of the largest studies ever, and 52,000 participants died during that period. Scientists realized that coffee-drinkers often smoked more, ate more red meat, and had other unhealthy habits, which may have skewed results. After controlling those factors, scientists found that , if you drank 2-6 cups of coffee a day, coffee reduced your chance of dying by 10-15%. Having been against coffee for my whole life, I see that my fears were not well-founded, and coffee might actually become more of a medicine than a poison! Researchers are isolating the 1000+ compounds found in coffee to find exactly what compounds are responsible for the positive health effect.
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