Is it possible that this phenomenon is specific to people with those mental illnesses? A wider general population study resulted in the inverse effect:
I only did a postgraduate degree, so I don't have the practice reading scientific studies to determine which is true. Maybe someone with more knowledge can chime in?
Separately from this study, here's an interesting opinion piece by John Ioannidis titled "The Challenge of Reforming Nutritional Epidemiologic Research", published in JAMA 2018:
> Assuming the meta-analyzed evidence from cohort
> studies represents life span–long causal associations, for
> a baseline life expectancy of 80 years, eating 12 hazelnuts
> daily (1 oz) would prolong life by 12 years (ie, 1 year per
> hazelnut), drinking 3 cups of coffee daily would achieve
> a similar gain of 12 extra years, and eating a single man-
> darin orange daily (80 g) would add 5 years of life. Con-
> versely, consuming 1 egg daily would reduce life expec-
> tancy by 6 years, and eating 2 slices of bacon (30 g) daily
> would shorten life by a decade, an effect worse than
> smoking. Could these results possibly be true?
You're joking, but that's probably the right strategy: make sure to enjoy things on both sides of the aisle, so you don't have to worry about which side adds, and which removes, years. And then don't fret about it.
Aside from that, I'd love to know how each of those items affects life quality. Living long is only a life goal up to a certain age, and from what I've seen around me, that age is very rarely 90.
I would generally recommend ignoring observational nutrition studies like this one. There's just a massive amount of bunk science in that area. Correlations all over the place, very little evidence for causation.
Studies of larger populations yield more typical results. Consequently, studies of smaller populations yield more extreme results.
That's not to say that these results might not be significant -- what you propose may be the case -- but I'd want to see an actual mechanism of action before buying something like this.
The inverse possibility--that nicotine, and perhaps caffeine as well, heighten the risk of psychosis in those genetially predisposed--has also been considered.
Not diagnosed, but eventually I noticed how veggies gave me psychotic episodes that would last for a few days. Was connected to oxolates seemingly. After one week of probiotics psychosis doesn't happen when I eat veggies now.
True, and it could also be what the person has with the coffee. I have a feeling people that drink instant coffee are more likely to add milk, creamer, or sugar.
That said, instant coffee is just freeze-dried coffee. There's a possibility its effect is no different.
I think it’s typically a different species (Coffea canephora). So theoretically drinking bean tea of a different plant could have different health impacts.
No, it affects everybody. Says so in the article. The distinction appears to be that severe mental illness is associated with shortened lifespan so coffee has a more profound anti-aging affect on that population.
I wonder if what seems like much higher margins in coffee allow for more articles like this. While I want what they are saying to be true, I wish I did not have to pay $15.00 for a 26 ounce can of coffee.
As someone formally diagnosed with one of these mental illnesses, I can confidently say that coffee triggers a beneficial reaction to my illness as well as to other health-adjoint mechanisms in my body. To me, drinking coffee is like breathing air or eating food, and to go without it means symptom flare-ups.
Is it the coffee or caffeine in coffee? Do you feel the same benefits if you have decaffeinated coffee? Can you replace it with just caffeine pills to get same effect?
I have not tried caffeine pills myself, but I have found caffeine in general to be slightly beneficial, but with coffee having the most pronounced effect on my symptoms.
Likely an effect of MAO inhibitors in coffee. Caffeine itself is also a MAO inhibitor (in addition to its primary effect of adenosine receptor antagonism), but there are dozens of others in the brew.
Is it possible that the coffee drinkers have more social interaction with the barista and others? It's unclear from the paper if they eliminated the confounding factors around coffee drinking.
Do you like sweets? I noticed as I became an adult sometime in my mid-20s, I stopped liking sweet flavors as much and developed a new appreciation for bitter flavors. Like coffee and some vegetables.
My tastes changed a lot over the years. I quit liking sweets in my early 20s, I rarely even have sugar in the house.
Sometime in my late 30s I started appreciating more nuanced flavors, including black coffee, but mostly vegetables like green beans, tomatoes, asparagus, peas, carrots. Once that happened, I started realizing how much food is blasted with so much salt that obliterates said flavors.
I assume it's mostly normal, as a kid I found my parents tastes bland...ew who could eat vegetables by themselves with no seasoning? Well, me now apparently...
There was a time when my diet was consistently full of very sweet things -- in particular, with beverages: More soda? Another mocha latte swimming in sugar? Another quart of orange juice? Yes, please.
But also food: How can a person walk past a selection of fresh donuts without having one?
Eventually, for reasons that initially were budgetary more than anything else, I discovered some coffee that I really liked the natural flavor of at a local place. I started getting that -- plain, black -- instead of a latte, mostly because $2.10 is a lot less than $3.75.
That coffee was Ethiopian Yirgacheffe. This particular one had its own distinct, subtle sweetness that hit the spot for me and was part of a basically-daily feel-good routine for years until their roaster stopped selling it.
But by then, I was a black coffee convert. And I didn't even notice at the time, but I'd also stopped buying soda in bulk -- it became a rare entity in my life instead of a daily fixation.
I also stopped buying things like cookies and donuts. I began to skip the pie at gatherings.
That all happened in my 30s.
Nowadays, motivated only by what I feel like eating or drinking instead of some desire to make healthy choices or something, my intake is good-tasting spring water (the tap water here sometimes tastes of mud), decent black coffee, inexpensive tea, and [of course] beer.
My food has taken a turn for the bland, too.
I buy carrots and celery at the store to munch on, instead of a bag of cookies. Things like rice and beans and fish have an abundance of flavor that I wasn't able to appreciate before. For gatherings, I make a big relish tray full of fresh vegetables -- and I munch on them more than anyone else does.
I seldom buy breakfast cereal now, but I used to eat a lot of it -- and I'd load it up with more sugar. Last year I did buy some store-brand raisin bran but I found that it was too much of a sugar bomb to really enjoy as a meal. I couldn't make myself finish it; most of it wound up in the compost. (I did find some very plain bran flakes that I liked a lot better -- 12-year-old me would not have been impressed.)
This is all a bit weird to describe because the only deliberate decision involved was to try to save a bit of money on coffee-house coffee in my 30s.
But did that decision actually have anything to do with it? Or is this instead a tale as old as time itself, wherein: Tastes simply change?
(But yeah, I do enjoy an occasional sugar bomb. But only literally-occasionally. For instance: A single 12-ounce bottle of Coke is very nice sometimes. I probably drink as many as 2 or 3 of those in a whole year.)
My own take. The point is that the link may be the other way around. The population of people who tend to drink coffee might age slower. Perhaps due to some third variable like wealth or race. Correlation is not causation.
yup it's true, and as some point out, consumption in the early morning, when we all get a proinflammatory, normal response, is perfect timing for the antioxidant flood of coffee to counteract it all.
The rest of the day is another story, every day! Hopefully one of the better stories.
That was my routine for a few years to ward off huntington’s disease. I don’t think the science panned out for blueberries and huntington’s, but in the mean time I got old enough to realize I didn’t have the genes for it (yes I was too cowardly to be tested)
I cut coffee for a year or so 10 years ago due to stomach issues, then slowly added fancy espresso drinks back, figuring that if I was only having coffee once a week, it might as well be fancy. I don’t seem to have stomach issues now with 1-2 lattes/cappuccinos a day.
Maybe it’s unrelated, all in my head, better beans, or the 3-4 oz of whole milk, but maybe give espresso drinks a try if you haven’t?
Do you add whole milk to coffee? The casein and fat should help to reduce acidity and make it easier on the stomach.
If you can't do that, I've heard of people adding a sprinkle of baking soda as a buffer to black coffee. I'm not sure how much you'd need, probably just a tiny amount that you'd barely be able to taste.
I've been self-medicating ADHD with multiple cups of coffee a day since I was 17. I'm in my early 30s now, and after getting on Vyvanse, have reduced then given up coffee. I realised that coffee was the reason for my anxiety which builds up towards the end of the day.
I reduced my coffee down to 1 espresso per day two months ago, and quit entirely two weeks ago. I'm still on stimulants, but Vyvanse treats ADHD much better and has fewer side-effects.
Over the NHS recommended limit is better than zero caffeine for everyone. If their limit is correct is in question
Whether "those with severe mental illness" get more benefit seems unlikely biologically. But like everyone coffee is good for you.
The only point of research like this, since we know coffee is good, is finding the mechanisms. But it's highly open to p-hacking/experimental error, which is how universities work now. You should default to this is citation farming.
The article leans heavily on associative language to imply a causal anti-ageing effect of coffee in people with severe mental illness. The underlying work appears to be a secondary analysis of two existing cohorts, using blood-derived “biological age” algorithms rather than any clinical ageing endpoints. These clocks are proxies built from DNA methylation or other biomarkers and are known to vary with many behavioural and metabolic factors unrelated to ageing itself. The study did not track morbidity, mortality, or functional outcomes, so the link to “slower biological ageing” is interpretative.
Coffee intake was self-reported and grouped into rough consumption categories. People with severe mental illness often have uneven lifestyles and medication profiles, so residual confounding is substantial. The models adjust for some variables, but unmeasured factors such as sleep, socioeconomic circumstances, smoking patterns, and medication effects could readily produce the pattern seen. The shape of the association (“up to about two cups a day”) is typical of non-linear confounding in observational nutrition research, yet the article treats this as a plausible biological threshold.
Quotes such as “shows that moderate coffee consumption was associated with slower biological ageing” suggest a degree of mechanistic insight that the study cannot provide. Nothing in the design tests whether coffee causes any change in the underlying biology. No intervention was performed, and the cohorts were not designed to explore caffeine metabolism, brew type, or the many additives that accompany coffee drinking.
The framing around mental illness implies a specific benefit in this group, but the evidence only shows a statistical association in a subset of observational datasets. The article does not mention that biological age algorithms differ in what they measure, can disagree with one another, and often reflect current health status rather than ageing processes. It also omits that the confidence intervals around subgroup effects may be wide, especially when stratifying by diagnosis and consumption band.
Overall, the data are narrow: observational, self-reported exposure, proxy biomarkers, multiple potential confounders. The article overstates the finding and treats a modest association as evidence of a limit to coffee’s “helpfulness”, when the study cannot define such a threshold or establish causation.
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