Live data from Hacker News

Consumption of a dark roast coffee blend reduces DNA damage in humans

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

41–50 of 170 posts

Re: Consumption of a dark roast coffee blend reduces DNA damage in humans

#41
To what extent are "DNA strand breaks", as measured in a blood sample, correlated with other health outcomes?

Caffeine is a diuretic. The coffee group likely consumed more total liquids in the course of the treatment. So the mechanism might be simply more flushing of damaged cells – possibly beneficial, but not unique to coffee.

It's odd for the headline to highlight "dark roast" when lighter roasts weren't tested, for comparison.

Re: Consumption of a dark roast coffee blend reduces DNA damage in humans

#43
post #2

Quick googling indicates that tea has similar effect https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24585444 (very small study but effect size is good), another study is https://academic.oup.com/jn/article/138/8/1567S/4750818 What are the common ingredients in coffee and tea except caffeine? EDIT: It seems like black tea also, although I can't make sense of the biological jargon. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jf010875c

Why couldn't caffeine be the main mechanism-of-action?

It's a diuretic, so those treated with coffee likely drank more total liquids during the study, and perhaps flushed more older/damaged cell material.

Re: Consumption of a dark roast coffee blend reduces DNA damage in humans

#44

I have a simple rule in my life: Anything that is addictive is harmful to us. Coffee falls in that bucket.

Watch out for carrots[1]. Lots of non-addictive things are also harmful, of course, but I suppose that doesn't by itself invalidate your principle. In the case of coffee and tea it seems possible that the benefits outweigh the harm.

1: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3109/000486796090626...

Re: Consumption of a dark roast coffee blend reduces DNA damage in humans

#45
post #41

To what extent are "DNA strand breaks", as measured in a blood sample, correlated with other health outcomes? Caffeine is a diuretic. The coffee group likely consumed more total liquids in the course of the treatment. So the mechanism might be simply more flushing of damaged cells – possibly beneficial, but not unique to coffee. It's odd for the headline to highlight "dark roast" when lighter roasts weren't tested, f…

Hypothesis: they tested both dark and light roasts, the light roast showed no effect or a bad one, hence this study. Just an hypothesis, I have no data to back that up.

Re: Consumption of a dark roast coffee blend reduces DNA damage in humans

#47
I drink coffee nearly every day; I am reading this in a coffeeshop. But, p = 0.028? Come on. If you tested for a few dozen things, you would expect to find at least one that had a p-value like that. Was this pre-registered to look at only DNA damage, via this metric? Or did they look at 100 different things to find one with p=0.028?

Of course, if they pre-registered and their theory was that it would reduce DNA damage as measured in this way, that would be a bit different, but from this article it's hard to say.

Now, back to drinking my mocha latte.

Re: Consumption of a dark roast coffee blend reduces DNA damage in humans

#48
I'm willing to bet there is another study that coffee causes some sort of cancer (last I saw it was linked with colon cancer). I'll still drink my coffee, and tea, and probably continue to consume nicotine in one of many forms.

Life is too short to worry about maybe, probably is something you should likely worry about - that why I stopped inhaling burning things to feed my nicotine addiction, while cancer isnt all that likely, COPD, heart failure, and others issues sure as hell are.

Re: Consumption of a dark roast coffee blend reduces DNA damage in humans

#49

"Funding This study has been supported by Tchibo GmbH, Hamburg, Germany." Tchibo is a German chain of coffee retailers and cafés known for its range of non-coffee products that change weekly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tchibo Number of locations 700 shops (Germany) 300 (rest of world) They might want to make some in-store claims about Dark Roast...

I'm generally sceptical of all studies about coffee for this very reason. There's a lot of bullshit studies around food and supplements funded with people with strongly vested interests in selling more product. It's a real problem. For any given supplement, you can often find multiple studies supporting its use and multiple studies saying it's harmful. When it comes to coffee specifically, if you listen to the studie…

To some extent isn't that expected?

Let's face it - who would spend the money to fund a study on a substance that's been around for hundreds (thousands?) of years?

Probably if you're going to spend the money to investigate it, you expect some kind of return. So sadly, all these studies end up being funded by people with an interest in a positive outcome.

The bigger question to me is, does that immediately invalidate their results?

Re: Consumption of a dark roast coffee blend reduces DNA damage in humans

#50

Stopped drinking coffee months ago and I have never felt better. Anxiety is down. Sleeplessness is down. General mood is up. Best of all, I no longer get headaches due to Caffeine withdrawal.

When I’m not drinking coffee, I’m less forgetful and think more clearly. I’m less anxious and better in tune with my body. I also feel more myself.

But I love coffee and am usually consuming it. Thank you for sharing your experience. I’ll need to try taking a break soon.

Post reply on HN