I'm a good target market for pro-coffee writing, but this is just an observational study of a drinks habit. No one in the general public should have any interest in studies of this kind.
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.
The endless articles about studies that are pro-coffee make me highly skeptical. They all feel like advertising by the coffee industry to help coffee addicts feel good about their habit instead of feeling like they should cut back.
it could be that coffee acts directly on the endocrine system as they suggest, or coffee allows you to work out longer (or work out at all since you don't want to sit still) which leads to the effects they observed
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
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?
> 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).
I don't know about the life shattering part. It's generally agreed that nicotine is extremely addictive. And yet I don't think you'll find many, if any, people homeless purely out of a nicotine addiction.
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.
> 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?
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.)
I don't think there needs to be a nefarious motive for results like this to come out of nutrition studies. If you have a pile of data and you analyze every possible correlation between every possible pair of variables, you will find something significant by pure chance. Green jelly beans and all that.
Is there a net benefit that you see, ignoring the fact that you're no longer dependent?
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 constantly hear coffee drinkers say how much they drink with shame and that they should cut back. It's one of the most common things I hear when someone is talking about their coffee consumption.
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.
I can’t speak for them, there are a variety of reasons they might lead to it. But I do see shame/regret being the emotion.
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.
Coffee (caffeine related products really) from my understanding seems to harshly impact deep sleep.
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:
Interesting, as far as I remember, those effects did not show up in studies (yet?). But it's been years since I looked it up on examine.com which was mostly free back then.
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.
Your sure those effects have manifested in studies for moderate caffeine consumption?
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.
I feel that way about the endless studies showing fiber is important for health, too. Because there's no way studies re-confirm findings because they're revealing truth. It's definitely Big Leaf at work.
The meat, tobacco, alcohol, etc industries would like very much to be able to do this but haven't with much larger budgets.
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:
The alcohol industry was successful with it for a while. There was a time when it seemed a new study came out every month about how alcohol, in moderation, was associated with a longer healthier life than abstaining completely. Then all the studies about the antioxidants(?) in wine. My grandma used to have a small glass of wine every night for the health benefits it was supposed to have. These days we’re being told there is no safe level of consumption and any amount is bad, but even that message hasn’t been widely communicated.
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.
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.
Addiction implies dependence. If you feel unable to be a productive member of society without a psychoactive substance that you must ingest daily, then I have bad news for you.
There's nothing wrong with dependence! It's the harm that makes it addiction, and coffee in moderation has no harm. (I suppose some people get headaches if they don't drink it, but that certainly doesn't affect me.) Fear of benefitting from psychoactive substances per se on a daily basis sans harm is irrational.
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.
This part: "positive associations with total testosterone (β = +0.29 nmol/L per cup/day)". For testosterone, 1 nmol/L ≈ 28.8 ng/dL. So: +0.29 nmol/L ≈ +8.4 ng/dL per additional cup/day.
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.
I cannot tell: Is this sarcasm? Really: That is not healthy to consume so much caffeine per day, unless you are drinking decaf. Depending upon your size of coffee, they are mostly 6-8 fluid ounces, or about 70-90mg of caffeine per "cup".
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).
There is absolutely no way that it is safe to "often" drink 12 cups of coffee per day.
High SHBG and lower free hormones isn't a good thing usually. Starving and anorexia (as an example) can make your SHBG levels skyrocket, resulting in low free hormone levels.
I have to say, initially coffee is good, but over time it chips away your sleep, your rest and then you kind of lose it. I have periods where I purposely decondition my body and brain from coffee just to reap the benefits again without all the longterm downsides. As always, it is about balance and moderation. I hope this helps you.
Love coffee, drink it every day. This study is just as useful as other studies that correlate coffee with negative outcomes. Which is to say, it’s a study that just shows some correlations. Causation is not particularly likely. Drink coffee if you like it but don’t expect health benefits or harms.
For people who are already addicted to sugar, yes, coffee tastes more aggressive than the drinks full of insane amounts of sugar or artificial sweeteners.
Meanwhile in Asia beans are considered sweet bc their food isn't overloaded with sugar.
It sounds like you're equating "aggressive" with "sweet".
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.
Yes, my inference was "people consume caffeine, and if one group is getting it from coffee, the other group is getting it from non-coffee, mostly (highly-caloric) soda water, which explains why the coffee side looks healthier."
Perhaps this is the sign of a true addict but I would never travel someplace new without a backup supply of coffee. I always at least bring instant coffee; if it’s a longer trip I might bring a portable grinder and aeropress.
"Higher coffee consumption was linked to a more favourable glucose–insulin profile, higher concentrations of total and bioavailable testosterone, and increased levels of sex hormone-binding globulin (SHBG). At the same time, free testosterone and the free androgen index were modestly lower. In women, hormonal associations were more limited and were primarily characterised by higher SHBG and lower measures of free androgens."
- Total testosterone = free + bound to albumin + bound to SHBG
- Bioavailable testosterone = free + bound to albumin
- Free testosterone = free (not bound to any protein)
...aaaand now I got a mild headache. Is this good or bad? Is this why the title says "links" and not "promotes" or "inhibits" or any other word with a concrete negative or positive connotation?
I'm a good target market for pro-coffee writing, but this is just an observational study of a drinks habit. No one in the general public should have any interest in studies of this kind.
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.
The endless articles about studies that are pro-coffee make me highly skeptical. They all feel like advertising by the coffee industry to help coffee addicts feel good about their habit instead of feeling like they should cut back.
Either point out weaknesses in the study, or dubious funding behind it etc. Or just stick with saying that you prefer tea.
it could be that coffee acts directly on the endocrine system as they suggest, or coffee allows you to work out longer (or work out at all since you don't want to sit still) which leads to the effects they observed
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
Decaf still has caffeine; about 30% of the original from the bean iirc.
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.
FDA requires 97% reduction to claim “decaf”. Swiss Water Process removes 99.9% for example.
Or links between the study and coffee industry
Or possibly one of those who stick to only water.
AmishNews
> coffee addicts
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?
I've known people with disabling headaches until they hit 200mg+ of caffeine in the AM. They are caffeine addicts.
>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 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).
I don't know about the life shattering part. It's generally agreed that nicotine is extremely addictive. And yet I don't think you'll find many, if any, people homeless purely out of a nicotine addiction.
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.
My father's one of those people who get a headache unless they get their morning cup of tea. That is what deters me from caffeine.
> 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?
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.)
I don't think there needs to be a nefarious motive for results like this to come out of nutrition studies. If you have a pile of data and you analyze every possible correlation between every possible pair of variables, you will find something significant by pure chance. Green jelly beans and all that.
https://xkcd.com/882/
Whether or not the results are being taken seriously is another matter.
Why should they feel like cutting back? Where’s the evidence that it’s bad for you?
I cut back because I found that I couldn't go a day without it without a massive headache.
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.
Is there a net benefit that you see, ignoring the fact that you're no longer dependent?
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 suppose for me the net benefit is I can do without it. I don't like the feeling of being dependent on something.
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.
I constantly hear coffee drinkers say how much they drink with shame and that they should cut back. It's one of the most common things I hear when someone is talking about their coffee consumption.
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.
Shame due to what? Because they are suffering somehow or because they feel like it must be bad for them because they enjoy it?
I can’t speak for them, there are a variety of reasons they might lead to it. But I do see shame/regret being the emotion.
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.
Coffee (caffeine related products really) from my understanding seems to harshly impact deep sleep.
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
Interesting, as far as I remember, those effects did not show up in studies (yet?). But it's been years since I looked it up on examine.com which was mostly free back then.
It causes:
- 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.
Your sure those effects have manifested in studies for moderate caffeine consumption?
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.
I feel that way about the endless studies showing fiber is important for health, too. Because there's no way studies re-confirm findings because they're revealing truth. It's definitely Big Leaf at work.
The meat, tobacco, alcohol, etc industries would like very much to be able to do this but haven't with much larger budgets.
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...
The alcohol industry was successful with it for a while. There was a time when it seemed a new study came out every month about how alcohol, in moderation, was associated with a longer healthier life than abstaining completely. Then all the studies about the antioxidants(?) in wine. My grandma used to have a small glass of wine every night for the health benefits it was supposed to have. These days we’re being told there is no safe level of consumption and any amount is bad, but even that message hasn’t been widely communicated.
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.
Addiction implies harm. What is the harm in coffee consumption?
Addiction implies dependence. If you feel unable to be a productive member of society without a psychoactive substance that you must ingest daily, then I have bad news for you.
There's nothing wrong with dependence! It's the harm that makes it addiction, and coffee in moderation has no harm. (I suppose some people get headaches if they don't drink it, but that certainly doesn't affect me.) Fear of benefitting from psychoactive substances per se on a daily basis sans harm is irrational.
You just have to mirror your consumption of coffee; eggs; meat &c with the aggregate study mood for a given week, is all.
Here is the original study: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00394-026-04038-z
Weirdly, I cannot copy text from that page. What am I doing wrong?
Regardless, here is the result summary:
This part: "positive associations with total testosterone (β = +0.29 nmol/L per cup/day)". For testosterone, 1 nmol/L ≈ 28.8 ng/dL. So: +0.29 nmol/L ≈ +8.4 ng/dL per additional cup/day.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.
I often drink a 12 cup pot in a day. No noticeable effects.
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.
I cannot tell: Is this sarcasm? Really: That is not healthy to consume so much caffeine per day, unless you are drinking decaf. Depending upon your size of coffee, they are mostly 6-8 fluid ounces, or about 70-90mg of caffeine per "cup".
Here is a quote that I found:
There is absolutely no way that it is safe to "often" drink 12 cups of coffee per day.High SHBG and lower free hormones isn't a good thing usually. Starving and anorexia (as an example) can make your SHBG levels skyrocket, resulting in low free hormone levels.
I have to say, initially coffee is good, but over time it chips away your sleep, your rest and then you kind of lose it. I have periods where I purposely decondition my body and brain from coffee just to reap the benefits again without all the longterm downsides. As always, it is about balance and moderation. I hope this helps you.
Clicked article expecting the requisite "...in mice" but it turns out this could be legit!
I wonder if the mechanism of action here is increased caffeine consumption resulting in more/longer duration/higher intensity exercise.
Love coffee, drink it every day. This study is just as useful as other studies that correlate coffee with negative outcomes. Which is to say, it’s a study that just shows some correlations. Causation is not particularly likely. Drink coffee if you like it but don’t expect health benefits or harms.
Only if it’s coffee from Brazil :-)
Something I learned years ago: caffeine doesn't directly "wake you up" it merely causes a trickle of adrenaline release.
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.
This is not the mechanism by which caffeine promotes wakefulness.
That's totally wrong.
For one, caffeine is a known adenosine antagonist. The effects of adenosine is described as "drowsiness" or "relaxed".
This was not a caffeine consumption study.
Maybe because the other way to get Caffine is in drinks full of corn syrup.
You can get corn syrup free monsters everywhere. Or those 5 hour ones, or Celsius or whatever.
The reason to prefer coffee is that it tastes less aggressive than those I think
Coffee tastes more aggressive than all of those.
For people who are already addicted to sugar, yes, coffee tastes more aggressive than the drinks full of insane amounts of sugar or artificial sweeteners.
Meanwhile in Asia beans are considered sweet bc their food isn't overloaded with sugar.
It sounds like you're equating "aggressive" with "sweet".
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?
The study links it to better metabolic health. Did you assume it meant worse?
I think they're saying that coffee is a healthier habit than soda.
Yes, my inference was "people consume caffeine, and if one group is getting it from coffee, the other group is getting it from non-coffee, mostly (highly-caloric) soda water, which explains why the coffee side looks healthier."
Makes sense, but I would hope the study design controlled for this, or designed around it.
I like coffee and drink about 5 to 7 Nespresso capsules a day. Except when I forget, or have no access to coffee.
I did not notice any change between these two extremes.
I also drink a lot of coffee and I really hate it when I'm visiting a client and they offer me only 1 or 2 cups of coffee during the day!
Perhaps this is the sign of a true addict but I would never travel someplace new without a backup supply of coffee. I always at least bring instant coffee; if it’s a longer trip I might bring a portable grinder and aeropress.
Title sounds terrible, but the effects are positive from what I understood?
Not effects, just observations, as the article also states.
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"Higher coffee consumption was linked to a more favourable glucose–insulin profile, higher concentrations of total and bioavailable testosterone, and increased levels of sex hormone-binding globulin (SHBG). At the same time, free testosterone and the free androgen index were modestly lower. In women, hormonal associations were more limited and were primarily characterised by higher SHBG and lower measures of free androgens."
- Total testosterone = free + bound to albumin + bound to SHBG
- Bioavailable testosterone = free + bound to albumin
- Free testosterone = free (not bound to any protein)
...aaaand now I got a mild headache. Is this good or bad? Is this why the title says "links" and not "promotes" or "inhibits" or any other word with a concrete negative or positive connotation?
Obligatory reminder about correlation != causation, as indicated in the article itself:
> 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...
People don't need this reminder on Hacker News. Maybe on Reddit, but even there it's dogma repeated by damn near everyone.
And yet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49304804
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