Coffee is the lifeblood of human civilization. One usually uses that term when referring to oil. And indeed, without cheap oil, the wheels of western industrialized civilization would come off, and we’d live the way the Greenies intend: residing in “sustainable” mud huts, wearing rags for clothes, and bartering mouse meat for extravagances like ballpoint pens or nail files.
I'm not exaggerating coffee's importance. With 400 billion cups drunk annually, coffee’s economic, cultural, and social importance cannot be denied. Indeed, if oil greases the wheels of industrialized civilization, then coffee surely lubricates its living, breathing, moving parts.
The history of coffee is weird. The reason for this is that homo sapiens have probably known of every edible plant, root, grass, and tuber on planet Earth for more than 100,000 years. Agriculture — the planting and harvesting of crops — has been around for at least 10,000 years. And yet, the coffee bush escaped cultivation until around 1100 A.D. Why this is so is a mystery. Poppies have been cultivated for at least 5,000 years; marijuana even longer. It is amazing that the little bush, thought to have originated on the hillsides of Ethiopia, was not generally recognized for either its medicinal properties or the salutary effects the berries had on our constitutions. Arabs figured out a rudimentary way to drink the crushed beans, although I'd give a hard pass to the concoction the Arabs came up with. Legend credits Sheikh Omar with discovering the roasting process by accident after trying to boil bitter, raw seeds over a fire to make them edible. He added cardamom and a little milk.
The bush had a strange journey. From 1100 A.D. in Arabia, where it was punishable by death to export the bean; then across the Bosphorus to Turkey; then Venice; and on to Europe in the early 1600s, where coffee shops sprang up like grass across Western Europe. These were not the coffee bars of today. They were raucous dens of iniquity and debauchery. English coffee shops hosted the finest minds of the pre-enlightenment and can be credited in no small way with facilitating the spread of radical democratic ideas. Authorities tried several times to clamp down on these ideas by closing the coffee shops, as if one could stop a tidal wave by commanding the ocean to cease making waves.
The medical research community has debated the health benefits and drawbacks of drinking coffee for more than 100 years. Recently, researchers followed 131,821 participants for up to 43 years.
“This is a very large, rigorous study conducted long term among men and women that shows that drinking two or three cups of coffee per day is associated with reduced risk of dementia,” said Aladdin Shadyab, an associate professor of public health and medicine at the University of California, San Diego.
The findings, published Monday in JAMA, don't prove caffeine causes these beneficial effects, and it’s possible other attributes protected caffeine drinkers’ brain health. But independent experts said the study adjusted for many other factors, including health conditions, medication, diet, education, socioeconomic status, family history of dementia, body mass index, smoking and mental illness.
The caffeine correlation held regardless of whether people had genetic risk factors for Alzheimer’s or other dementias. The study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, didn’t distinguish between dementia types.
Some previous studies haven’t found cognitive benefits from caffeine, but those studies often had limitations like shorter time periods or one-time assessments of diet, experts said. The new study aligns with a growing body of research “that’s suggested caffeinated coffee may reduce risk of age-related chronic diseases,” Dr. Shadyab said.
"Compared with people who consumed virtually no caffeine, people who drank between one and five cups of caffeinated coffee had about 20 percent less dementia risk," reports the Times. "Those who drank at least one cup of caffeinated tea daily had about 15 percent less risk."
One of the interesting aspects of this study is that coffee addicts like me who down a pot or more a day can drink as much coffee as we can hold and still enjoy the lower risk of dementia. The researchers say that we shouldn't drink too much coffee because it interferes with our sleep. I have a cup with dinner and a cup after dinner, and sleep like a baby. Go figure.
Like most of you who drink coffee, they could have found that coffee has no beneficial effects, and I would still drink a pot a day. Sure, it's an addiction. But as long as it doesn't kill me, I will drink it. A beverage gifted by the almighty to facilitate conversation and social interaction, also, as it turns out, is good for you as you get older.
A win-win in my book.
