Coffee benefits – and why you should drink more

Due to coffee benefits and it’s properties I can easily rank it in my top 5 drinks of all time. It’s right up there with Coke Zero, kefir and chocolate milk.

It’s a gift from nature and while plain dark coffee isn’t delicious by itself, as it is an acquired taste it has many benefits that makes it a great drink.

So when I write about coffee benefits have in mind that I’m not talking about that pink unicorn stuff that you get in starbucks. I personally like my coffee like my women, cold and bitter.

Also, most of the coffee benefits come due to caffeine so you need to drink proper coffee, not the decaffeinated abomination!

Coffee benefits 

Energy

Due to the fact it contains a stimulant called caffeine. Caffeine itself is actually the most commonly consumed psychoactive substance in the whole world.

On top of it, it blocks a neurotransmitter called adenosine. One of the primary actions of adenosine is to make us tired and sleepy, ready to go to bed. So by blocking it caffeine keeps us from feeling the effects of fatigue.

And in addition to that, the amount of other neurotransmitters increase. Norepinephrine and dopamine levels rise, which leads to enhanced firing of the neurons.

Many controlled trials in humans show that coffee improves various aspects of brain function. This includes memory, mood, vigilance, energy levels, reaction times and general cognitive function.

Increases fat oxidation

There is a reason caffeine is almost in every fat burner available. Caffeine is one of the few natural substances that have been proven to help with fat burning and weight loss.

It promotes fat loss through a couple of mechanisms. It increases the thermic effect of food, and also raises your metabolic rate.

Health benefits

Caffeine has an amazing influence on your immune system. So much in fact that nearly all the other health benefits below could be explained by its ability to fight and ward off disease. For example, diseases like type 2 diabetes and heart disease (Furman et al., 2017).

In short, without going to much into details caffeine blocks certain receptors on brain cells. In impeding these receptors, caffeine also blocks pathways that produce inflammatory molecules, the researchers found.

So, as you age, don’t be wary of coffee. In this study, the older men and women who drank more caffeine had fewer inflammatory molecules.

They also had lower blood pressure and more flexible arteries, more relatives who lived past age 90, and were healthier overall.

In a Japanese study of more than 76,000 participants, men and women who consumed coffee daily, reduced their risk of dying from a cardiovascular disease by as much as 38% (Mineharu et al., 2011).

And on top of that, the USDA’s new 2015 dietary guidelines recommend drinking coffee for better health.

So basically to sum it up, the coffee benefits related to health are:

• Reduces  post-workout muscle pain 
• Lowered risk of Type 2
• Lowered risk of Alzheimer’s disease
• Protection against Parkinson’s
• Protection against cirrhosis of the liver
• Lower Risk of Multiple Sclerosis
• Reduced Liver Cancer Risk
• Reduced heart attack mortality risk.

So to end it on a proper note, hopefully you were already drinking a cup of coffee while reading this article, and if not you will go make yourself one right now.

 

REFERENCES

1. Furman, D., Chang, J., Lartigue, L., Bolen, C. R., Haddad, F., Gaudilliere, B., … & Daburon, S. (2017). Expression of specific inflammasome gene modules stratifies older individuals into two extreme clinical and immunological states. Nature medicine, 23(2), 174-184. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28092664
2. Mineharu, Y., Koizumi, A., Wada, Y., Iso, H., Watanabe, Y., Date, C., … & Kondo, T. (2011). Coffee, green tea, black tea and oolong tea consumption and risk of mortality from cardiovascular disease in Japanese men and women. Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health, 65(3), 230-240. http://jech.bmj.com/content/65/3/230
3. Maridakis, V., O’Connor, P. J., Dudley, G. A., & McCully, K. K. (2007). Caffeine attenuates delayed-onset muscle pain and force loss following eccentric exercise. The Journal of Pain, 8(3), 237-243. http://www.jpain.org/article/S1526-5900(06)01023-6/abstract
4. Pereira, M. A., Parker, E. D., & Folsom, A. R. (2006). Coffee consumption and risk of type 2 diabetes mellitus: an 11-year prospective study of 28 812 postmenopausal women. Archives of internal medicine, 166(12), 1311-1316. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16801515
5. Maia, L., & De Mendonça, A. (2002). Does caffeine intake protect from Alzheimer’s disease?. European Journal of Neurology, 9(4), 377-382. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12099922
6. Hedström, A. K., Mowry, E. M., Gianfrancesco, M. A., Shao, X., Schaefer, C. A., Shen, L., … & Alfredsson, L. (2016). High consumption of coffee is associated with decreased multiple sclerosis risk; results from two independent studies. J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry, jnnp-2015. http://jnnp.bmj.com/content/early/2016/02/03/jnnp-2015-312176.short
7. Brown, O. I., Allgar, V., & Wong, K. Y. K. (2016). Coffee reduces the risk of death after acute myocardial infarction: a meta-analysis. Coronary artery disease, 27(7), 566-572. http://journals.lww.com/coronary-artery/Citation/2016/11000/Coffee_reduces_the_risk_of_death_after_acute.8.aspx