Coffee protects against some major diseases

“For a while, scientists suspected that drinking coffee was hazardous to your health. But hundreds of studies have painted coffee in a different light, showing that it may be protective against some major diseases,” reports The Washington Post.

As it notes, “coffee has wide-ranging effects on your health. Coffee contains more than 1,000 chemical compounds.” In the past, some scientists thought coffee was bad for your health and increased the risk of bladder cancer or lung cancer. 35 years ago, the the World Health Organization listed coffee as “possibly” carcinogenic.

But claims that coffee caused cancer were wrong, and were due to mistaking “correlation for causation.” Smokers “also tend to drink a lot of coffee — and in many of the early studies, a large percentage of the coffee drinkers were also smokers. Once studies took this into account, the link between coffee and lung and bladder cancers essentially disappeared.” Since then, hundreds of studies have found that coffee “may be protective against some major diseases, including several cancers.”

A meta-analysis by medical researchers looked at 67 different health outcomes and found that for most adults, daily coffee consumption was “more likely to benefit health than harm” it. “On average, the analysis found, people who drink several cups of coffee a day are nearly 20 percent less likely to die early compared with people who drink little or no coffee.”

Studies have consistently found “that drinking coffee is good for your liver,” according to Rob van Dam, a professor at George Washington University. For example,

“One study published in 2021, for example, followed nearly a half million adults for roughly 11 years and found that coffee drinkers had a 21 percent lower risk of developing chronic liver disease and a 49 percent lower likelihood of dying” from it. “The reduction in risk was associated with an intake of as little as one cup of coffee daily, but people who consumed between three and four cups per day saw the greatest benefits.”

Coffee also seems to lower the “risk of Type 2 diabetes.” “Many large studies have found that people who drink three to four cups of coffee daily have about a 25 percent lower risk of the disease compared with people who drink little or no coffee. In fact, your likelihood of developing diabetes decreases about 6 percent for each cup of coffee you consume daily (up to about six cups).”

Studies consistently find that frequent coffee consumption “lowers your risk of developing Parkinson’s disease. Scientists think this is in large part due to the caffeine in coffee. In a large meta-analysis” drawing from two dozen studies, “scientists found that people who drank up to three cups of coffee daily were 28 percent less likely to develop Parkinson’s disease compared to people who drank little or no coffee. Meanwhile, people who drank up to two cups of tea daily had a 26 percent lower likelihood of developing Parkinson’s.”

Some other substances also aren’t as bad as people think. Smoking is very bad for your health because of the smoke it emits (smoke is carcinogenic), not because it contains nicotine. Indeed, nicotine may protect against Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. “Study finds nicotine safe, helps in Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s,” reported the Tampa Bay Times:

Nicotine — the calming chemical that cigarettes deliver — might actually be good for the aging brain….A study of Alzheimer’s patients showed that those who wore nicotine patches were better able to remember and pay attention than those who didn’t. Another study showed that nicotine boosted cognitive function in older people who didn’t have Alzheimer’s, but were showing signs of age-related mental decline.

Nicotine also seems to protect against Parkinson’s disease, in which the death of cells in a small area of the brain results in tremors, impairing movement and as well as cognitive difficulties.

So what’s going on? How does the dreaded addictive component of cigarettes produce health benefits?…Nicotine by itself isn’t very addictive, according to Dr. Paul Newhouse [of Vanderbilt University]. Nicotine seems to require assistance from other substances found in tobacco to get people hooked. What makes nicotine especially attractive as a treatment is the fact it causes virtually no side effects. “It seems very safe even in nonsmokers,” he said. “In our studies we find it actually reduces blood pressure chronically. And there were no addiction or withdrawal problems, and nobody started smoking cigarettes. The risk of addiction to nicotine alone is virtually nil.”

If that study holds up, it is an additional reason to fight restrictions on nicotine delivery devices such as e-cigarettes, which, unlike cigarettes, do not emit smoke (which causes cancer). E-cigarettes emit vapor containing nicotine, not smoke.

“E-cigarettes could replace much or most of cigarette consumption in the U.S.,” said Smokefree Pennsylvania’s William T. Godshall. His group had campaigned in the past for smoke-free spaces, higher cigarette taxes, and graphic warnings about the dangers of cigarettes on cigarette packs.

As Jacob Grier points out, “the best available evidence suggests that vaping is far safer than smoking cigarettes, that it is more effective than nicotine patches or gums at helping smokers quit, and that the health benefits of encouraging smokers to switch outweigh the harms of vaping.” Research shows that “widespread switching from smoking to vaping would prevent between 1.6 million and 6.6 million premature deaths by 2100.”