That coffee is bad for one’s health is a very common talk. Many have associated it with nervousness, tremors and even heart attacks. The latter claim that moderate coffee drinking is connected with heart attacks has been a subject of a study of patients with cardiovascular complications. The findings seemed to indicate that moderate coffee drinkers succumbed to heart attack a few hours after a morning coffee drink.
But, this study is never without a flaw. It is a well known fact among cardiologists that heart attacks do really occur mostly in the morning, regardless on whether a person is a coffee drinker or not. So, the connection between coffee drinking and heart attack is really very weak (to say the least).
On the contrary, moderate coffee drinking was found to be beneficial in the body’s battle against the damaging effects of free radicals. The study was done by a group of chemists in India and was published in the international science journal, the Medical Science Monitor (medscimonit.com). It was found that a major component of coffee, namely caffeine, along with its catabolic products theobromine and xanthine, exhibit antioxidant activity or an ability to prevent the damaging effects of free radicals.
Free radicals are always produced naturally by our cells as a result of normal metabolism and these may also be formed as a result of ionizing radiation from the sun. These free radicals are known to cause genetic mutations and/or serious damage to the DNA of our cells. Doctors know that damage of our genetic material has been the culprit of so many genetic disorders such as cystic fibrosis, hemophilia, diabetes and all the variety of cancers that you know.
The said study was done using the latest molecular methods available, which are able to observe and quantify the activity of a certain molecule with precision. So, it is not just based on shallow correlations of coffee drinking to disorders of patients which are subject to many factors anyway.
However, the results of the study cautions coffee drinkers that drinking too much coffee and thus causing an increase in the concentration of caffeine in your body leads to a reverse effect or a prooxidant activity wherein caffeine converts Cu (II) to Cu (I). The latter form of copper induces DNA damage similar to those caused by free radicals. But note that this conversion of copper by caffeine occurs only when copper concentration in your body is high, which is neither normal.
In any case, the findings of this study prove that coffee does something good inside our body. But, there is a reason to go for moderation since it was also found that too much of caffeine in our body reverses the good that it does.
Citation:
Azam, et al. (2003). Antioxidant and prooxidant properties of caffeine, theobromine and xanthine. Med Sci Monit, 2003; 9(9): BR325-330
