Live Long! Drink Coffee!

May 21, 2012 By Mark D. Roberts 3 Comments

I’ve been a coffee drinker for about 37 years. During this span of time, I have occasionally been worried by reports that coffee consumption is bad for your health. It gets blamed for stomach disorders, high blood pressure, heart disease, and, if you can believe it, even the jitters. Yet, every now and then, I’d read an article that commends coffee drinking as beneficial for health. For some strange reason, I tend to find those articles more reasonable and persuasive. Hmmm.

A beautiful latté from Joe, the Art of Coffee, in New York City. Photo credit to Nathan Roberts, my coffee drinking son.

I just finished another of this kind of article. It appears in a recent edition of the New York Times with the headline: “Coffee Drinkers May Live Longer.” Here’s how the article by Tara Parker-Pope begins:

Your morning cup of coffee may start to taste even better after a major government study found that frequent coffee drinkers have a lower risk of dying from a variety of diseases, compared with people who drink little or no coffee.

The report, published online in The New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday, analyzed the coffee-drinking habits of more than 400,000 men and women ages 50 to 71, making it the largest-ever study of the relationship between coffee consumption and health.

Previous studies have offered conflicting results on the relative benefits or harms associated with regular coffee consumption. While coffee contains caffeine, a stimulant that may temporarily increase heart rate and blood pressure in some people, coffee also contains hundreds of unique compounds and antioxidants that may confer health benefits. Further confusing much of the research into coffee is the fact that many coffee drinkers are also smokers, and it has been difficult to untangle the relative health effects of coffee and cigarettes.

In fact, as Parker-Pope explains in her article, coffee drinkers tend to engage in a variety of behaviors that do not promote health. “They ate more red meat and fewer fruits and vegetables, exercised less and drank more alcohol – all behaviors associated with poor health.” Ouch.

The National Institutes of Health study of 229,119 men and 173,141 women who were members of the American Association of Retired Persons controlled for behaviors known to be unhealthy so as to focus only on the impact of coffee drinking on health. And what did they find?

[T]he data showed that the more coffee a person consumed, the less likely he or she was to die from a number of health problems, including diabetes, heart disease, respiratory disease, stroke, infections and even injuries and accidents.

Over all, the risk of dying during the 14-year study period was about 10 percent lower for men and about 15 percent lower for women who drank anywhere from two cups to six or more cups of coffee a day. The association between coffee and lower risk of dying was similar whether the coffee drinker consumed caffeinated or decaffeinated coffee.

The actual conclusion of the NIH study did not joyfully declare “Live Long! Drink Coffee!” Rather, it found: “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.” So the experts are not claiming that coffee actually helps you live longer. No causal relationship here.

Perhaps there isn’t anything in coffee that helps you live longer. Maybe the health benefits come, not from the drink itself, but from behaviors associated with drinking coffee, such as, sitting down for a few moments of quiet relaxation or engaging in stimulating conversation with friends. Who knows? In the meanwhile, I am drinking my cup of coffee this morning, thankful for the possibility that it may be enhancing my health as well as my enjoyment of this day.

Filed Under: Health Tagged With: , 3 Comments

How Exercise Helps You Think Better

December 2, 2011 By Mark D. Roberts 4 Comments

It’s not uncommon these days to hear pop psychologists, fitness gurus, and even serious scientists claim that exercise helps us think better. There is some connection, it is asserted, between physical exercise and the brain. Now, we are beginning to understand this connection, which supports the notion that exercise actually helps us to think better.

A recent article in the New York Times, “How Exercise Benefits the Brain,” Gretchen Reynolds reviews recent scientific studies that demonstrate the connection between physical exercise and thinking. In one of these studies, people were given a memory test. Then, half of the subjects vegged out, while the other half engaged in strenuous exercise. Then they took the test again. Those who had exercised did markedly better on the latter test.

What might explain this result?

Meanwhile, blood samples taken throughout the experiment offered a biological explanation for the boost in memory among the exercisers. Immediately after the strenuous activity, the cyclists had significantly higher levels of a protein known as brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, which is known to promote the health of nerve cells. The men who had sat quietly showed no comparable change in BDNF levels.

For some time, scientists have believed that BDNF helps explain why mental functioning appears to improve with exercise. However, they haven’t fully understood which parts of the brain are affected or how those effects influence thinking. The Irish study suggests that the increases in BDNF prompted by exercise may play a particular role in improving memory and recall.

In another study review by Reynolds, exercise even appears to slow the negative effects of aging in the brain functioning of pilots.  The article concludes with a quotation from Dr. Ahmad Salehi, an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Stanford, who says, “But for everyone, the evidence is very, very strong that physical activity will increase BDNF levels and improve cognitive health.”

So, do you want to think more clearly? Do you want to maintain your brain function as you get older? Then go and get some exercise, and keep it up.

Filed Under: Health Tagged With: , , , 4 Comments

Get Exercise. Think Better.

September 30, 2011 By Mark D. Roberts Leave a Comment

We all know that exercise strengthens our muscles and contributes to overall health. Now, there is solid evidence for the benefits of physical exercise on the brain.

In a recent article in the New York Times, “How Exercise Can Strengthen the Brain,” Gretchen Reynolds summarizes a new study at the University of South Carolina. This study focused on mice, measuring the impact of exercise on their brains. Here are some excerpts from Reynolds’ article:

Like muscles, many parts of the brain get a robust physiological workout during exercise. “The brain has to work hard to keep the muscles moving” and all of the bodily systems in sync, says J. Mark Davis, a professor of exercise science at the Arnold School of Public Health at the University of South Carolina and senior author of the new mouse study, which was published last month in The Journal of Applied Physiology. Scans have shown that metabolic activity in many parts of the brain surges during workouts, but it was unknown whether those active brain cells were actually adapting and changing. . . .

This is the first report to show that, in mice at least, two months of exercise training “is sufficient stimulus to increase mitochondrial biogenesis,” Dr. Davis and his co-authors write in the study.

The finding is an important “piece in the puzzle implying that exercise can lead to mitochondrial biogenesis in tissues other than muscle,” says Dr. Mark Tarnopolsky, a professor of medicine at McMaster Children’s Hospital, who was not involved with this experiment but has conducted many exercise studies. . . .

More immediately, Dr. Davis speculates, re-energized brain cells could behave like mitochondrial-drenched muscle cells, becoming more resistant to fatigue and, since bodily fatigue is partly mediated by signals from the brain, allowing you to withstand more exercise. In effect, exercising the body may train the brain to allow you to exercise more, amplifying the benefits.

Revitalized brain cells also, at least potentially, could reduce mental fatigue and sharpen your thinking “even when you’re not exercising,” Dr. Davis says.

Of course, this study was upon mice, not humans. But, it’s likely that human brains would respond similarly to mice brains when human bodies exercise.

The moral of the story? If you want to think better, get regular exercise. And watch out for those smart mice.

Filed Under: Health Tagged With: , , Leave a Comment

Be Healthy! Eat More Chocolate!

September 2, 2011 By Guest Contributor Leave a Comment

Even the New York Times has good news once in a while! Here’s a headline I like to read:

Evidence of Heart Benefits From Chocolate

According to the author, Nicholas Bakalar:

An analysis of studies including more than 100,000 subjects has found that high levels of chocolate consumption are associated with a significant reduction in the risk of certain cardiovascular disorders.

The seven studies looked at the consumption of a variety of chocolate — candies and candy bars, chocolate drinks, cookies, desserts and nutritional supplements. By many measures, consumption of chocolate was linked to lower rates of stroke, coronary heart disease, blood pressure and other cardiovascular conditions.

Now that’s what I call good news!

Filed Under: Fun, Health Tagged With: , Leave a Comment