Coffee: Why We Should Keep Refilling Our Cups - Study Finds Popular Drink An Unlikely Elixir

by Science News | Health & Wellness

From liver disease to diabetes, coffee compounds protect against an array of health conditions. So Coffee not only picks you up, it might put off the day they lower you down.

* Benefiticial: The Coffee Bean

Though they are quick to add a disclaimer of not making `medical claims' about their products, most sellers of coffee and coffee-products are often never fail to mention the beneficial effects of coffee to our health and why we should spend on it.

But coffee was considered a bad drink.  And many often blamed it for lack of sleep, students preparing for exams would speak of taking coffee to keep them awake while they studied through the night.

Coffee was often blamed for containing a high concentration of caffeine, a claim which gave birth to a new product line - The Decaffeinated Coffee.  Coffee has also been blamed by slim-fits for not being able to add weight. But are all these claims true?

A September 18, publication by Science News Magazine instead credits coffee with providing humans with a lot of benefits that range from curing liver diseases to managing diabetes. In fact Organo Gold, for example, highlights diabetes cure as one of the important testimonies received from drinkers of its coffee products.

Coffee is also said to be capable of protecting against an array of health conditions.

According to Science News Magazine, the nutritional attributes of coffee have leapfrogged since the 1980s, when Norwegian researchers reported that coffee seemed to fend off liver disease.

"Since then, the dark brown beverage has shown value against liver cancer, too, as well as type 2 diabetes, heart disease and stroke. Coffee even appears to protect against depression, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases." The implication is that coffee is capable of extending our lifespan.

According to cardiologist Arthur Klatsky, who has researched coffee for decades at the Kaiser Permanente Northern California Division of Research in Oakland: “People notice the caffeine,” adding “And there is this general feeling that anything that has some effect on the nervous system has to have something bad about it.”

And it doesn’t help that caffeine is mildly addictive. And its effects on hypertension is also being disproved.  In fact, according to Rob van Dam, a Dutch nutritional epidemiologist at the National University of Singapore: "Coffee consumption has not been consistently linked with hypertension" and most worries do not stand their ground when checked closely in large population studies.

Frank Hu, a Harvard nutritional epidemiologist: “It’s extremely difficult to impossible to tease out the effects of the individual components of coffee because there are so many of them,” says adding “And they travel together.”

Read the full finding at www.sciencenews.org.