Study suggests three coffees a day reduces premature mortality by 8% to 18%

#1: Post by **rpavlis** » July 10th, 2017, 7:03 pm

There was an interesting study in the El país news site:

https://elpais.com/elpais/2017/07/10/ci ... 64937.html (Spanish)

The study certainly involved a lot of people.

#2: Post by **RockyIII** » July 11th, 2017, 1:02 am

Here an article in English on the same topic.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/10/health/co ... index.html

Rocky

#3: Post by **Marcelnl** » July 11th, 2017, 2:37 am

nice, the big question is if there is a dose related effect, which we might assume given the fact that three cups a day are mentioned....I'll hold my breath until we see a thorough and well designed prospective study...anyone doing it could claim coffee as a drug and we'd all be seeing the doctor to get a prescription

July 11th, 2017, 4:23 am

And get a pill of freeze dried instant?

And the conclusions in a Dutch newspaper: http://www.ad.nl/wetenschap/door-koffie ... ~ad55bae6/

(No difference between decaf and regular?)

#5: Post by **mathof** » July 11th, 2017, 7:21 am

As you can imagine, this story is of great interest in Italy too:

http://www.repubblica.it/salute/aliment ... 170479223/

It's often said that the "Mediterranean diet" explains why the Italians are the longest lived people in Europe. Maybe it's the coffee.

Matt

#6: Post by **aecletec** » July 11th, 2017, 7:17 pm

RockyIII wrote:Here an article in English on the same topic.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/10/health/co ... index.html

Rocky

Good of them to link to the actual studies but a little caution is thrown into the wind with reporting on epidemiology... It's often the first step in trying to understand a phenomena, not a well designed trial as already mentioned.
This is handy short resource for the interested: https://www.healthnewsreview.org/2017/0 ... -emphasis/
The tl;dr option is that it's not a robust relationship and even if it does exist could be associated with something else, e.g. The genetic preference for bitter might be the cause, not the consumption of coffee (most consumption isn't specialty).
There's a heap of other evidence suggesting coffee is healthy so it's not like I'm going to stop soon!!

#7: Post by **Randy G.** » July 11th, 2017, 7:41 pm

I would say that they have gone about this from the wrong point of view. My hypothesis:

"Not interfering with my coffee-drinking rituals will reduce your chance of premature mortality by approximately 100%."

#8: Post by **samuellaw178** » July 11th, 2017, 8:03 pm

aecletec wrote:Good of them to link to the actual studies but a little caution is thrown into the wind with reporting on epidemiology... It's often the first step in trying to understand a phenomena, not a well designed trial as already mentioned.
This is handy short resource for the interested: https://www.healthnewsreview.org/2017/0 ... -emphasis/
The tl;dr option is that it's not a robust relationship and even if it does exist could be associated with something else, e.g. The genetic preference for bitter might be the cause, not the consumption of coffee (most consumption isn't specialty).
There's a heap of other evidence suggesting coffee is healthy so it's not like I'm going to stop soon!!

I suppose the finding can also be reported as : if you drink three coffees a day, you may (or may not) face premature mortality by 82-92%. How's that for a headline?

But maybe not what most of us want to hear.

Have no access to the original article here so don't really know the methodology how the recruitment was done etc..

#9: Post by **jtcipro** » July 11th, 2017, 8:11 pm

aecletec wrote:Good of them to link to the actual studies but a little caution is thrown into the wind with reporting on epidemiology... It's often the first step in trying to understand a phenomena, not a well designed trial as already mentioned.
This is handy short resource for the interested: https://www.healthnewsreview.org/2017/0 ... -emphasis/
The tl;dr option is that it's not a robust relationship and even if it does exist could be associated with something else, e.g. The genetic preference for bitter might be the cause, not the consumption of coffee (most consumption isn't specialty).
There's a heap of other evidence suggesting coffee is healthy so it's not like I'm going to stop soon!!

This statement sums it up very well. I analyze these kind of studies as a full time job and finding out the effect of food on death is almost impossible because of so many different things that you can't account for. If you want to get into the real nitty gritty, when you look at the numbers for this type of study you would expect to see much greater numbers if there was truly an association.

#10: Post by **jpender** » July 11th, 2017, 9:28 pm

samuellaw178 wrote:Have no access to the original article here so don't really know the methodology how the recruitment was done etc..

Full text HTML:
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1112010

PDF format:
http://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMoa1112010

Their succinct conclusion:

"In this large prospective study, coffee consumption was inversely
associated with total and cause-specific mortality. Whether this was a
causal or associational finding cannot be determined from our data."