Guzzling Coffee May Cut Heart Disease

New Scientist ^ | 6-16-2008 | Ewen Callaway

[blam]

Guzzling coffee may cut heart disease

22:00 16 June 2008
NewScientist.com news service
Ewen Callaway

A strong cup of coffee in the morning can feel like a life saver. Now, one of the largest and longest studies of coffee drinking suggests that coffee may indeed boost your lifespan – providing you drink enough of the stuff, that is.

The study tracked 129,000 men and women over two decades. It found that people who consumed several cups of coffee every day were less likely to die of heart disease than those who shied away from the stuff. Heart disease is an umbrella term for conditions including heart attacks, stroke, and arrhythmia.

The researchers found that women who drank four to five cups per day were 34% less likely to die of heart disease, while men who had more than five cups a day were 44% less likely to die.

Consumption caution

The new report adds heft to the hypothesis that coffee can stem heart disease, perhaps by battling the inflammatory damage associated with early stage illness.

"It looks like coffee has some effect that hasn't been established before. The general idea is that coffee is not so bad," says study leader Esther Lopez-Garcia, an epidemiologist at the Autonomous University of Madrid.

Yet Lopez-Garcia and other experts caution that it's too early for people to act on the study's findings.

"Before declaring that drinking up to seven cups of coffee per day is beneficial for health, we should wait for some other confirmation," warns Francesco Sofi, an epidemiologist at the University of Florence, who was not involved in the study.

The new study is not the first to connect coffee drinking with good health. Over the years, other

[ForGod'sSake]

"Before declaring that drinking up to seven cups of coffee per day is beneficial for health, we should wait for some other confirmation," warns Francesco Sofi, an epidemiologist at the University of Florence, who was not involved in the study.

Thanks for the advice Francesco, but like most of the other joojoo the Scientific Community™ promulgates, this too will be taken with a grain - or two, of salt ;^)

Maybe they should just mind their own business.

[stravinskyrules]

Well, if they relase a study tomorrow saying masturbation cures cancer I’m gonna go light up a cigar to celebrate.

[Clinging Bitterly]

My doctor has been trying to get me to lay off the go-juice and the coffin nails for years. Over the years I have been sent to the ER more than a couple times for symptoms that have been blamed my high coffee consumption. It sometimes makes me tach out, along with angina. But heart tests always come out fine and after learning the results I calm down & I'm good for about 18 months. It is a cycle I have repeated for about 12 years now. Doc says it's the coffee as other causes for rapid heartbeat are ruled out, but try as I might, I simply can not function without it.

Early stage COPD is getting me more concerned about smoking these days and I have cut my smoking in half.

[bray]

And we were all told that it was bad for your heart. More junk science shown for what it was. When we going to find the truth about Global Scamming?

Pray for W and Our Troops

[Marcella]

I have a four cup pot in my bedroom and have two cups and watch the news from my bed. After that, I have enough “get up and go” to put the rest of the coffee in a thermos and head downstairs to drink the rest while I fire up my computer. I will not give up coffee and I want real coffee, none of the “flavored” coffee crap.

[uglybiker]

I only have one cup of coffee per day.

I just top it off about a dozen times.:-P

I'm gonna live forever!

[blam]

"Early stage COPD is getting me more concerned about smoking these days and I have cut my smoking in half."

I quit smoking 9 months ago after 40+ years. I still want one every day though. If I have to give up coffee, I'd rather die, lol. (BTW, I gained 25 pounds in 9 months)

[upsdriver]

Yet Lopez-Garcia and other experts caution that it's too early for people to act on the study's findings.

Too late! I have been acting on it for years! And guzzling is a good word for my coffee drinking. Black, strong and lots of it!

[TASMANIANRED]

Chocolate is good for you and now coffee.

Life is good.

[upsdriver]

My day starts with a pot of 8 o'clock. I finish with a glass or two of red wine with dinner, and a good whiskey with my evening cigar...

That's what I would call a well balanced diet!:)

[LucyT]

women who drank four to five cups per day were 34% less likely to die from heart disease

Then I'm gonna live forever. So good so far.

[CaspersGh0sts]

You might also want to tell him that drinking coffee decreases the likelihood of getting diabetes, too. ;)

Which, of course, would also lower your risk of getting heart disease. And kidney disease. And losing your vision. And lower your risk of impotence. And peripheral neuropathy....

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/06/060628091738.htm

Coffee is yummy, too! :) Just stay away from too much cream, sugar, and whipped cream, though.

[Psycho_Bunny]

Ya....I had much the same thing happening. It reached the point where I had twitching so bad I couldn't sleep.

My doctor gave me 30 days of larazepam and told me to stop drinking coffee.

This was the second time I tried: the first time I tried I couldn't move for two days. Literally, I was crawling to the bathroom to take a bath.

So this time I went and bought a pound and a half of regular, a half-pound of decaf and mixed them.

When I ran out of that, I bought a pound of each. I went a couple pound-of-each cycles then went to a half-pound of regular/pound and a half of decaf. After a couple cycles of that, I went all decaf.

It worked. Now I don't even like the stuff.

[shibumi]

http://www.vorpral.net/gothicimages/Coffee%20Messiah%201.jpg

[LucyT]

Coffee is yummy, too!

A shot of Irish Whiskey added to all that sugar and cream makes it even better. Oh, don't forget to add coffee.

[nightlight7]

Wait a minute.....so this will offset the smoking?

Smoking doesn't need any offsetting -- tobacco smoking extends lifespan of smokers. Note that this does not imply that 'smokers live longer'. To see why, consider an example - although respirators extend lifespan the users of respirators live shorter than non-users or ex-users of respirators. In other words, both, therapeutic/protective factors or harmful factors can statistically correlate with diseases or reduced lifespan. It is the task of hard science (such as animal experiments, randmized intervention trials) to disentangle the causal chains. The statistical correlations on self-selected subjects are a mere hint for hard science to find out where in the causal chain leading to disease some factor (smoking, respirators...) fits.

For the last 50 years the antismoking "science" had, therefore, sought to show in experiments (on lab animals) that smoking shortens lifespan of smoking animals or any disease at all. It always backfired showing exactly the opposite -- smoking animals live longer, stay thinner, healthier under variety of exposure to industrial toxins & carcinogens and perform better on tests (especially on cognitive tests). For example, National Cancer Institute sponsored a massive series of experiments on smoking animals from 1970 to 1974. For test animals, the scientific team chose a breed of 'Syrian golden hamsters' which were known to be particularly sensitive to tobacco smoke. In separate groups they exposed hamsters to dusts of known carcinogens & industrial toxins (in 5 groups: asbestos 1,2, NiO, CoO, diethylnitrosamine) or to plain filtered air (1 group "sham dust" to equalize stress of handling). Each of these groups was further divided into smoking half (lifelong 7 hours/day exposure to heavy high tar cig. smoke) and non-smoking half (filtered air). The hamsters were left to live their complete lifespans then autopsied in detail. All the smoking hamsters lived longer, stayed thinner and had lower tissue accumulations of industrial toxins they were exposed to. Or, as the team's report to NCI concluded (from page 40 in the pdf file):

With the exception of the two asbestos-exposed groups (Groups 5 and 6), the groups exposed to cigarette smoke lived significantly (p<0.05) longer than their sham-smoke-exposed cohorts. The hamsters exposed to asbestos plus cigarette smoke also outlived their sham-smoke-exposed cohorts; however the difference was not statistically significant. Asbestos decreased the lifespan of the asbestos-exposed groups and thereby masked, to a degree, the difference in the survival between the smoke-exposed animals and their sham-smoke-exposed cohorts which is so readily apparent in other groups (Figure 23).

Here is one of the graphs given in the appendices, illustrating the consistent general pattern (upper curve is for survival advantage of smoking vs nonsmoking hamsters exceeding 40%, while the lower curve shows weight difference, with smoking hamsters staying thinner by 12 to 25%).

This isn't some kind of exception, but a consistent general pattern in hundreds of animal experiments in the last 50 years. For example, below is the survival graph from a 2005 mice experiment (discussed in another thread here or another 2004 experiment on rats):

In short: Smoking is good for you. The claims of antismoking "science" are based entirely on junk science (the statistical correlations on self-selected samples of smokers, non-smokers and ex-smokers), not because they didn't try using hard science but because hard science always came out the "wrong way", showing exactly the opposite from what they wished to see.

[pinkpanther111]

Drinking coffee, especially when it is decaffeinated, may be associated with a reduced risk of type 2 diabetes, according to a report in the June 26 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

Decaffeinated! Rats!! I hate decaffeinated coffee.

[Nachum]

Ah yes, steak, chocolate cream pies, and fried potatoes; best thing in the world for you....

[A_perfect_lady]

YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[paristwelve]

Coffee is also good for your liver, so have an expresso and live longer.