I love coffee. I drink a lot of it too. So, imagine my excitement when I saw even more recent studies being published supporting that coffee can help your health. The latest studies have shown coffee reducing the risks of diabetes, kidney disease, and heart disease. Now this is talking about my beloved bean water and not the seven dollar, sugary milkshakes with coffee flavoring that many people refer to as coffee.
We are seeing more and more studies showing the positive effects that coffee has on the body. There is no need to judge someone for the amount of coffee they drink. I understand that you may be concerned about the caffeine impact, but please understand it would take between 50-100 cups of coffee in less than a 24-hour period to kill a person. Every once in a while, you will see a news article about someone dying from a caffeine overdose and sure enough at least five people will send me the article and say "please be careful." Often those articles are missing information. Often caffeine pills or a large number of energy drinks are a part of these cases. Sometimes the person in the article had also been drinking alcohol and caffeine, which can be very dangerous.
I can't even imagine drinking more than 50 cups of coffee. I just can't. So please don't worry about me. Just let me enjoy my cup of joe.
When my coffee habit developed into daily occurrence at the beginning of high school I decided I needed to do some of my own research so I knew exactly what facts that were being thrown at me were true. So I decided to let my science nerd self-splurge and here is some fun information about coffee that you may or may not of known.
This vanilla latte I got this one time at Collins Quarter in Savannah
Like mentioned before coffee has shown a positive link to various health benefits including reducing the risks of dementia, diabetes, kidney disease, and heart disease . The decreased risk of kidney disease is linked to coffee being a diuretic . The increased urine production "helps things flow" if you will, decreasing kidney infections, diseases, and the chances of getting kidney stones. Coffee also has other metabolic effects. It releases free fatty acids from fatty tissue. This helps decrease risks of heart disease, heart attacks, and stroke.
Many of you might not even really know how caffeine works in the body. As many people love to point out to me, caffeine is a drug. Now don't worry because the definition of drug is simply "a medicine or other substance which has a physiological effect when ingested or otherwise introduced into the body." Caffeine is also considered a food additive by the FDA . Caffeine can be extracted from a natural source (like coffee beans) or it can be synthesized from uric acid.
Caffeine looks very similar (molecularly) to adenosine when it is binding to nerve cells after being absorbed into the blood stream. Adenosine and caffeine, though looking similar, have very different jobs in the brain. Adenosine promotes sleep. When you take in caffeine, the caffeine binds to the adenosine receptor. The caffeine doesn't send any nerve messages to the brain, but since it is bound to and blocking all of the adenosine receptors your brain does not get the messages from adenosine to start getting sleepy.
I hope now after reading this you can enjoy you cold brew, latte, pour over, or macchiato even more knowing that it could be helping your health. But really just enjoy it because it tastes good and you deserve that cup of coffee.
