Can Coffee Save Your Life?

Science marches on, providing us little people with invaluable guidance and also valuable guidance. We understand that hamburgers and fries consumed at every meal will probably kill us in 50-70 years. We learn to moderate. What do we know about coffee?

Not oddly enough, coffee is studied. Can coffee save your life? Dedicated researchers enedavor to uncover eternal truths pertaining to that which we stand in line to purchase at Starbucks. Here are just a few of the organized efforts on our behalf.

A subset of the Vanderbilt University Center for Latin American Studies, the The Vanderbilt Institute for Coffee Studies quests for answers to coffee's eternal questions. White-coated scientists and grad students delve into the health effects of coffee consumption. They analyze physiological interactions of your body parts with various compounds found in coffee. They investigate possibilities for therapeutic uses by studying pharmacology of its chemical components. They probably drink some as well, but that's informally documented and financially out-of-pocket.

Activities in the Institute receive financial support from members of the corporate sector including Nestle, Kraft Foods, Sara Lee, Starbucks.

Alberto Ascherio, toiling under the auspices of Harvard's School of Public Health, suggests that coffee may improve your life if you're a girl and depressed. Drinking the stuff could possibly lower your chances of depression by a full 20 percentage points. To be fair, caffeine deserves credit. Coffee is simply the delivery mechanism.

Dedicated researchers monitored 50,739 women in the United States over a 10 year period. For the scientifically uninformed, that's a lot of monitoring. Depression was noted if the subject self-reported themselves as being clinically diagnosed with such during the study. The age range of the subjects was self-reported as 30 to 55 years at the beginning of the study. All the subjects were employed as nurses. Only women who had not been previously diagnosed with depression before the study began were included in the study.

Caffeine consumption via tea, soda pop, and chocolate also correlated with lower incidents of depression.

Your contributions fund nutritional epidemiology studies at the National Cancer Institute. One such endeavor indicates that men drinking at least six cups of coffee a day might possibly have a 10 percent lower chance of dying.

For 14 years researchers studied coffee drinking habits of over 229,000 men. Compared to males who drank no coffee at all, dudes daily gulping six or more cups tended to die less. Guys who were already sick (cancer, heart disease and stroke) were not permitted to join in.

Researchers suggested that they had no idea if coffee actually caused the effect, or if other external factors contributed to the findings. They affirmed that the process of making the drink or even the lifestyle associated with heavy coffee guzzling could play a part.

A green coffee bean has not been roasted. Starbucks offers a squirt of green coffee bean concentrate as an adjunct to their roasted coffee drink. Extracts from green coffee beans just might increase weight loss. The promising nutraceutical contains high concentrations of chlorogenic acids that are indicated to have health benefits and to positively influence glucose and fat processing in the body.

Sixteen overweight adults were studied for twenty-two weeks: they statistically lost weight when served 1050 mg or 700 mg of green coffee bean extract. The study was executed in Bangalore, India, at Trinity Hospital. Applied Food Sciences, Inc, (Texas, USA) provided the intended nutraceutical in pill form. Green coffee extract is marketed by Applied Food Sciences as 'GCA' , or Green Coffee Antioxidant. Some participants ingested three 350 mg pills daily and others ingested two, except when given a placebo.