Whether it's a jumpstart for your morning or a study aid for those late hours, that coffee may be doing more than just perking you up. Caffeine, other than being widely known for its stimulatory, has other properties that have shown to be rather beneficial to those who indulge.
The chemical is a xanthine (purine base) alkaloid, with a conjugated system of electrons giving it an aromatic characteristic. Caffeine has shown to be a vaso-dilator, a diuretic, and an anti-oxidant as well. These properties (and possibly others) have proven themselves intriguing in a few recent studies.
There has been a link found correlating drinking coffee with a decrease in risk of dementia later in life. While they claim that subjects drinking 5 cups a day had a 65% lowered risk of developing the condition as compared to 2-a-day drinkers or less, they could not pinpoint why exactly these effects were observed.
Another study in 2004 followed a cohort of Finnish individuals over the course of 12 years and determined that there was a significant decrease in the risk of type II diabetes among coffee drinkers versus non-drinkers. The exact mechanism of caffeine in the decrease in risk remains unclear though.
Despite the fact that the studies refuse to justify their results with a precise mechanism, I believe that the effects stem from a synergy of the basic properties of caffeine. The anti-oxidative effects protect the body and brain from harmful radical oxygen damage. The vaso-dilating effect allows for blood to flow more freely. The stimulatory effects speed up the metabolism and excite the nervous system.
When these properties come together you get one stroke-preventing, blood-clot alleviating, cell damage-mitigating, food-digesting cocktail. So the next time I have a cup, its going to be a double.
--And high blood pressure? I'm not worried...I work well under pressure.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/24/health/research/24coffee.html?em
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/abstract/291/10/1213
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4 comments:
People should be wary of the fact that increased coffee drinking leads to decreased chances of type 2 diabetes. People should regulate the amount of sugar in each cup they drink and their overall diet as well.
I love caffeine, as most of us are chemistry or biology majors, I'm betting a lot of the class feels the same way. Caffeine is a great way to help get through long pchem problem sets and all the myriad other taxing things we have to do given our chosen majors. I also always love to hear good news like this about something I regularly consume, but I'm skeptical. Anytime a study can't or won't explain these I get skeptical. These studies seem reminiscent of the early longitudinal studies of the effects of 1-2 nightly glasses wine on overall health. The studies failed to control for the fact that the people who regularly drink 1-2 glasses a night are typically wealthier and therefore healthier. The studies do claim to control "for numerous socioeconomic and health factors" and it may simply be a lack of understanding of the exact mechanisms of action of caffeine, but these studies do highlight the importance of scrutiny in reading studies.
Also, as a correction, caffeine is a vaso-constrictor, not dilator, and is used with ergotamine(another vaso-dilator) as an alternative migraine treatment.
This post brings up a question I have always wondered about. Is caffeine addictive? I think that it is but this is solely based on personal experience, does anyone now if there is a concrete study out there on this topic? If there is not, I think one should be done, because caffeine has become a crucial part of peoples everyday lives.
The question of addiction is a bit tough to answer, especially for something like caffeine as one of the major criteria for addiction is continued use in the face of negative consequences. This is not always easy to see in something like caffeine that has very few short term or acute negative aspects even with habitual use. Honestly when's the last time caffeine caused you any real problems other than withdrawal?
That being said caffeine dependence and even intoxication are known conditions. There is also the issue of physical dependence, and tolerance that is also known. Caffeine acts on adenosine receptors, and can build a tolerance by increasing the number of adenosine receptors in the body. This in turn causes headaches, irritability and a plethora of other issues when you stop regularly taking caffeine. The issue of caffeinism has been studied, though I'm not sure how thouroughly and I cant access the journals the studies are published in.
Check out
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2607498
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/119549931/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0
The wikipedia page also isn't bad to start.
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