Healthy Organs and Glowing Skin: What is the Connection Between Coffee and DNA Damage?

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 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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