• Friday, March 29, 2024
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Experts explore health benefits of coffee

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The invention of the instant coffee Nescafe by Swiss food manufacturer Nestle in 1938 brought about the widely accessibility of coffee to all on a worldwide scale. Today, coffee is the second biggest commodity in the world next to oil. It is also one of the world’s most consumed beverage and about four hundred billion cups of coffee are consumed each year.

Recently, at an event organised to create awareness about the healthy aspects to coffee, Ignite, a science-based program, the first of its kind in Central and West Africa, unveiled the coffee mysteries in relation to health.

Bartholomew Brai of the Nigerian Institute of Medical Research (NIMR), Yaba, Lagos while speaking at the event said “coffee represents 4% of the world’s food and agricultural commerce and it is the most researched food substance as there are 20,000 publications on the topic of Coffee and Health. Coffee has natural bioactive compounds with beneficial properties like caffeine, antioxidant compounds, polyphenols, for example, chlorogenic acid (CGA) and melanoidins. One cup (240ml) of coffee provides: Chlorogenic acid – 70-350mg, Magnesium – 7-24mg (1-5% of RDA), Potassium – 34-116mg (1-2% of AI), Niacin – 1-3mg (6-18% of RDA) and Vitamin E (~ 0.1% of RDA).”

For Olusegun Joseph, a consultant cardiologist at LUTH, “coffee is one of the most controversial beverages globally and it has a long history of being blamed for many ills. Recent research findings indicate that coffee may not be so bad after all and may impact positively on life expectancy and life expectancy is dependent on factors such as country, public health, medical care and life style including smoking, diet, and exercise. Research over the past few years suggests that coffee consumption may protect against heart failure, type 2 diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, liver cancer, liver cirrhosis, gall bladder disease, etc.”

The antioxidant effect of coffee is becoming increasingly known however, protective mechanism of coffee against a host of diseases may involve a lot more than anti- oxidation.

A May 2012 study by the New England Journal of Medicine found that, during the course of their study, coffee drinkers who drank at least two or three cups a day were about 10 percent or 15 percent less likely to die for any reason during the 13 years of the study and according to a large prospective cohort study published in 2008, coffee moderately reduces the incidence of dying from cardiovascular disease

“Beneficial health effects of coffee could be due to possible protection against oxidation and an excess of oxidative stress may induce a deregulation of the metabolism,” Kemi Odukoya, a medical practioner reveals adding that coffee doesn’t cause addiction.

According to her, “The term ‘addiction’ implies a compulsive and repeated use of a substance that poses a threat to physical, social and economic health. Mechanisms of action of caffeine are very different from that of drug abuse and they do not affect the brain circuit and structure for reward, motivation or addiction. The effect of caffeine in nucleus accumbens is decrease in activity while that which is in cocaine and amphetamines causes increase in activity of the relevant cells.”

The American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) says that “diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders cites no evidence for caffeine withdrawal and the World Health Organisation (WHO) has stated that there is no evidence whatsoever that caffeine use has even remotely comparable physical and social consequences associated with serious drugs of abuse.

 

KEMI AJUMOBI