Healthy Organs and Glowing Skin: What is the Connection Between Coffee and DNA Damage?
It’s February, but it’s still New Year-ish, and there are still people finalizing their 2022 goals. Like every other year, people want to be healthier this year than last---or at least as healthy as they’ve ever been.
Coffee
& Overall Health
Coffee is a foundational
part of a healthy lifestyle. A study dating back to 2015 showed that people who
drink coffee are 15% less likely to die compared with non-coffee drinkers.
Coffee is
associated with a significantly reduced risk of diabetes, various cancers,
heart disease, dementia, depression, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease,
and constipation. And this is new for me: There is a body of emerging clinical
evidence showing that coffee decreases the risk of premature ejaculation. (More
to come in a separate post.)
But Why??
What is it
about coffee that make it so healthy? Antioxidants are a huge contributing
factor, but there must be more. In the quest to learn more about why coffee is healthy,
a group of researchers decided to investigate how coffee affects cellular
health on the DNA level.
100 people,
including 50 men and 50 women, were divided into 2 groups for 30 days. One
group was instructed to drink 500 millimeters (ml) of water (a little more than
2 cups) during the study, without consuming ANY caffeine at all. The other
group was instructed to drink 500 ml of dark roast caffeinated coffee during
the same period.
At the end
of the 30 days, the researchers analyzed the DNA of each group. The coffee
drinkers had much lower rates of DNA strand breakage, compared with those in
the water-drinking group. Coffee helped repair and protect cells from free
radical damage, resulting in less DNA strand breakage.
Overall,
they concluded that drinking coffee during this period reduced DNA damage by
23%. The implications are vast---that means that DNA damage in major organs and
the skin can be reduced by drinking coffee.
So if you
want stay healthy and have glowing skin, keep drinking your coffee and enjoy
every drop!
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