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

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

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

#131

Post by skookumchuck »

Myrmornis wrote: post #115
stevenhuang wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can often find multiple studies supporting its use and multiple studies saying it's harmful. While true and I get your point, there isn't anything inherently wrong with that. We should expect and welcome research with the awareness of vested interests. Afterall it's not surprising for a substance to be beneficial in certain ways yet harmful in other ways. Research from opposing groups will help identify all int…

I work for a biotech company that publishes peer-reviewed science. We use scientific publishing for marketing purposes, to influence the regulatory environment in our favor, and to look better than our competitors. Some of it is done to a very high standard. But in general, doing science with such predefined strategic objectives results in a corpus of scientific output that is hard to interpret. Essentially this sort…

> free from corporate interests

That won't help. All research is subject to the bias of the researchers. For example, many researchers have been caught fabricating results so they'll get famous. And just because someone is being funded by the government hardly means the government doesn't have a biased interest in the result. Everyone running the government has an agenda that isn't exactly altruistic.

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

#132

Post by ReptileMan »

coldtea wrote: post #127
stevenhuang wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can often find multiple studies supporting its use and multiple studies saying it's harmful. While true and I get your point, there isn't anything inherently wrong with that. We should expect and welcome research with the awareness of vested interests. Afterall it's not surprising for a substance to be beneficial in certain ways yet harmful in other ways. Research from opposing groups will help identify all int…

> We should expect and welcome research with the awareness of vested interests. No, we should ban vested interests from funding research studies and reduce the SnR.

No we should force publishing results of ALL trials. Not only positive ones.

It is not inheritly wrong to fund a study. But if you fund five and only one is good for you - all five should be published not cherry picked.

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

#133

Post by pergadad »

1_over_n wrote: post #15

"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 can't access the full text but from the summary it looks as if blood was taken only once. So the difference between one and the other group was not measured before-after and then the change compared, rather a simple comparison was made between the groups at the end. If that's true the whole thing is just bollocks - run it often enough and you'll find a group with this effect.

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

#134

Post by pergadad »

longerthoughts wrote: post #77
rossdavidh wrote: post #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 damag…

It's a little annoying if they're cherry-picking but does it really impact the validity of the results? If anything, I'd think they'd have a greater incentive to skew results if they were specifically testing a theory about DNA damage.

"I want to prove that it's good for something, but I don't care what it's good for" is not really a good research question. Then you'll measure 100 things and only publish the one that makes your intervention look good and possibly ignore all the ones that make it look bad.

It's also rather useless if you don't at least have some idea of the mechanism. Coffee has lots of different parts, so what part of it is useful - is it the caffeine? The tannins? ...? And how does it have this effect? Is it even the coffee or just that the coffee group took 5 minutes of rest to drink their brew and that is really the effect?

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

#135

Post by pergadad »

stochastic_monk wrote: post #50
flyGuyOnTheSly wrote: post #42

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.

Caffeine addiction can hit you hard, but withdrawal should be done after just a few days. So give yourself two weeks!

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

#136

Post by pergadad »

max76 wrote: post #110

I really hate bad science, and this is an example. Springer Science+Business Media (the publisher) does not transfer copyright of the paper from the author to the publisher like many other journals. This begs the question, why isn't this article open access? The primary author, Dorothea Schipp, is a statistics consultant in small town Germany [0] not associated with a University and the blood work was done in Slovaki…

As you have access to the paper - do they take blood only once and compare the groups or do they they take 2+ times and compare the change? With such a small sample the first option would be very dubious.

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

#137

Post by pergadad »

nabla9 wrote: 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

Individual studies can't tell you too much. Eg there was a rather solid study like tea to throat cancer risk with the analysis that it might have been due to the drinkers drinking tea at very high temperatures, rather than the actual content of the tea.

In this case, what really made the effect? Maybe the coffee group was just more likely to take a break (de-stress) or walk an extra flight of stairs to get the brew!

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

#138

Post by circlefavshape »

Myrmornis wrote: post #115
stevenhuang wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can often find multiple studies supporting its use and multiple studies saying it's harmful. While true and I get your point, there isn't anything inherently wrong with that. We should expect and welcome research with the awareness of vested interests. Afterall it's not surprising for a substance to be beneficial in certain ways yet harmful in other ways. Research from opposing groups will help identify all int…

I work for a biotech company that publishes peer-reviewed science. We use scientific publishing for marketing purposes, to influence the regulatory environment in our favor, and to look better than our competitors. Some of it is done to a very high standard. But in general, doing science with such predefined strategic objectives results in a corpus of scientific output that is hard to interpret. Essentially this sort…

Are you directly involved in this? If so - how do you justify it to yourself?

(if not then ignore the question - I'm just curious about the mindset of people who do ethically-questionable work)

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

#139

Post by pergadad »

emptybits wrote: post #12

I'm surprised (horrified?) that a control group's DNA deteriorates significantly enough in such a short trial to use as a comparison. #entropy

Central Europe. Maybe they took the 50 or so older people still living in the Tschernobyl exclusion Zone?

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

#140

Post by hnnh44 »

skookumchuck wrote: post #131
Myrmornis wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for a biotech company that publishes peer-reviewed science. We use scientific publishing for marketing purposes, to influence the regulatory environment in our favor, and to look better than our competitors. Some of it is done to a very high standard. But in general, doing science with such predefined strategic objectives results in a corpus of scientific output that is hard to interpret. Essentially this sort…

> free from corporate interests That won't help. All research is subject to the bias of the researchers. For example, many researchers have been caught fabricating results so they'll get famous. And just because someone is being funded by the government hardly means the government doesn't have a biased interest in the result. Everyone running the government has an agenda that isn't exactly altruistic.

This is funny.

Just a while back there was an article posted about how studies SHOULD start out with defined objectives. The argument was that academics are so desperate to publish positive results that they'll draw any positive conclusion, even if it wasn't what the study started out trying to accomplish.

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