People have wondered about the benefits, or lack thereof, of Coffee for a very long time. I grew up being told that if I drank coffee then it would stunt my growth! As a maturing young man, I steered clear. But as soon as I got to my full height I started drinking it pretty much every day. Thankfully it looks like drinking coffee doesn’t actually slow your growth, but according to a new study published in the Journal of Nature Medicine, it does lower levels of inflammation which just so happens to be behind a ton of major diseases.
Caffeine habit
The study revealed that the common denominator between older people with low levels of inflammation was their Caffeine habits. David Furman, a consulting associate professor at the Institute for Immunity, Transplantation and Infection at Stanford University said that the protection of the people from inflammation correlated directly with how much caffeine they consumed. He said that there was no boundary to this.
Furman and colleagues analyzed the blood of 100 people, both young and old, in the study. It comes as no surprise that the inflammation-related genes in the older folks tended to show more activity than that of the younger people. Several so called “aging diseases,” including Alzheimer’s, heart problems, diabetes, joint disorders, cancer, and hypertension, are all linked to inflammation, and in fact, calling these aging diseases would be a misnomer, because they are really inflammation diseases.
Researcher’s say that the circuit is inhibited and the inflammatory pathway turned off by caffeine, and the caffeine drinkers in the study were more protected than their counterparts. In fact, those who drank more than five cups of coffee every day had very low levels of activity in the inflammatory genes.
Further study
While some level of inflammation is necessary for the immune system to use to fight infections, too much is a bad thing, and in older people it isn’t regulated as well as it is in younger people.
The next step is to discover when this process begins to get out of control. An upcoming study by Furman and others of 1,000 more people may just be the key to further this research. But while we wait to hear the results, you may want to think about having some coffee.
