Saturday, 28 September 2013

Coffee Health Benefits - The Health Benefits Of Coffee

By Bill Jamison


Coffee contains many complex chemicals that have both beneficial and detrimental effects on your body.

It was long thought that the regular consumption of coffee increased the risk of cancer, heart disease and other illnesses, but it is now widely believed that this correlation between coffee and disease may have been due to the fact that many of the participants in earlier studies also smoked.

Coffee, in many circles is now thought to be beneficial to your health.

While coffee contains a number of different substances, including antioxidants and psychoactive chemicals, caffeine is by far the best known chemical compound in coffee and is the one which is responsible for the best known effects of coffee, both positive and negative. For instance, some people are especially sensitive to caffeine and may experience irritability, anxiety and have trouble sleeping after drinking more than four cups of the beverage daily. From what is currently known, it is recommended to drink coffee black and in quantities not exceeding three cups daily.

Coffee increases your alertness, which can be beneficial for certain tasks. A scientific study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that caffeine improves the ability of students to detect grammatical errors in written text, especially errors in verb tense and subject verb agreement. The same study did not show an improvement in the students' ability to detect misspelled words.

Caffeine has also been linked to a lower risk of depression. A Harvard University study published in The Archives of Internal Medicine found that drinking 2 - 3 cups of coffee daily decreased the incidence of depression in women by 15%, with participants drinking 4 or more cups daily having a 20% lower risk. The results of this study indicate the beneficial effects of caffeine over the release of mood-affecting neurotransmitters.

A study published in The Journal of Alzheimer's Disease found that mice who were given an amount of coffee equivalent to 4 - 5 cups in humans had elevated levels of the hormone Granulocyte Colony Stimulating Factor, which is believed to reduce the risk of Alzheimer's disease.

The Harvard School of Public Health published a study in The Journal of the National Cancer Institute on the link between coffee consumption and the incidence of prostate cancer. The study showed that men who drank 6 or more cups of coffee daily had a 60% lower risk of developing the deadliest type of prostate cancer and a 20% lower risk of developing any type of prostate cancer.

Caffeine may also reduce the risk of basal cell carcinoma, which is the most common form of cancer. This finding was recently presented to the American Association for Cancer research. A study at Brigham and Women's Hospital and Harvard Medical School also showed that women consuming at least three cups of coffee per day experienced a 20 percent reduction in the risk of skin cancer. The men in this study experienced a 9 percent reduction.




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