The rest of the day is another story, every day! Hopefully one of the better stories.
It's a lot of blueberries. But I can afford $60/month in frozen blueberries. Plus they're tasty. Also antioxidants or whatever.
https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/15/6/1354
I only did a postgraduate degree, so I don't have the practice reading scientific studies to determine which is true. Maybe someone with more knowledge can chime in?
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/wp-content/uploads/20...
> Assuming the meta-analyzed evidence from cohort
> studies represents life span–long causal associations, for
> a baseline life expectancy of 80 years, eating 12 hazelnuts
> daily (1 oz) would prolong life by 12 years (ie, 1 year per
> hazelnut), drinking 3 cups of coffee daily would achieve
> a similar gain of 12 extra years, and eating a single man-
> darin orange daily (80 g) would add 5 years of life. Con-
> versely, consuming 1 egg daily would reduce life expec-
> tancy by 6 years, and eating 2 slices of bacon (30 g) daily
> would shorten life by a decade, an effect worse than
> smoking. Could these results possibly be true?
That's not to say that these results might not be significant -- what you propose may be the case -- but I'd want to see an actual mechanism of action before buying something like this.
That said, instant coffee is just freeze-dried coffee. There's a possibility its effect is no different.
The inverse possibility--that nicotine, and perhaps caffeine as well, heighten the risk of psychosis in those genetially predisposed--has also been considered.
With that said, the fact that the other study seemed to find the opposite conclusion concerns me.
Coffee intake was self-reported and grouped into rough consumption categories. People with severe mental illness often have uneven lifestyles and medication profiles, so residual confounding is substantial. The models adjust for some variables, but unmeasured factors such as sleep, socioeconomic circumstances, smoking patterns, and medication effects could readily produce the pattern seen. The shape of the association (“up to about two cups a day”) is typical of non-linear confounding in observational nutrition research, yet the article treats this as a plausible biological threshold.
Quotes such as “shows that moderate coffee consumption was associated with slower biological ageing” suggest a degree of mechanistic insight that the study cannot provide. Nothing in the design tests whether coffee causes any change in the underlying biology. No intervention was performed, and the cohorts were not designed to explore caffeine metabolism, brew type, or the many additives that accompany coffee drinking.
The framing around mental illness implies a specific benefit in this group, but the evidence only shows a statistical association in a subset of observational datasets. The article does not mention that biological age algorithms differ in what they measure, can disagree with one another, and often reflect current health status rather than ageing processes. It also omits that the confidence intervals around subgroup effects may be wide, especially when stratifying by diagnosis and consumption band.
Overall, the data are narrow: observational, self-reported exposure, proxy biomarkers, multiple potential confounders. The article overstates the finding and treats a modest association as evidence of a limit to coffee’s “helpfulness”, when the study cannot define such a threshold or establish causation.
If you can't do that, I've heard of people adding a sprinkle of baking soda as a buffer to black coffee. I'm not sure how much you'd need, probably just a tiny amount that you'd barely be able to taste.
I'm basically a vampire now.
I reduced my coffee down to 1 espresso per day two months ago, and quit entirely two weeks ago. I'm still on stimulants, but Vyvanse treats ADHD much better and has fewer side-effects.
Where does that put me? Caffeine poisoning or immortality with no in between?
> basically a vampire now.
Do you mean 2-3 liters?
What about decaf only; 0.3% coffee?
Is decaf linked to slower biological aging, too?
All of these studies are hot garbage, hopelessly confounded, the biggest scam in science is "controlling for".
Do an RCT and watch the coffee magic evaporate.
Sometime in my late 30s I started appreciating more nuanced flavors, including black coffee, but mostly vegetables like green beans, tomatoes, asparagus, peas, carrots. Once that happened, I started realizing how much food is blasted with so much salt that obliterates said flavors.
I assume it's mostly normal, as a kid I found my parents tastes bland...ew who could eat vegetables by themselves with no seasoning? Well, me now apparently...
There was a time when my diet was consistently full of very sweet things -- in particular, with beverages: More soda? Another mocha latte swimming in sugar? Another quart of orange juice? Yes, please.
But also food: How can a person walk past a selection of fresh donuts without having one?
Eventually, for reasons that initially were budgetary more than anything else, I discovered some coffee that I really liked the natural flavor of at a local place. I started getting that -- plain, black -- instead of a latte, mostly because $2.10 is a lot less than $3.75.
That coffee was Ethiopian Yirgacheffe. This particular one had its own distinct, subtle sweetness that hit the spot for me and was part of a basically-daily feel-good routine for years until their roaster stopped selling it.
But by then, I was a black coffee convert. And I didn't even notice at the time, but I'd also stopped buying soda in bulk -- it became a rare entity in my life instead of a daily fixation.
I also stopped buying things like cookies and donuts. I began to skip the pie at gatherings.
That all happened in my 30s.
Nowadays, motivated only by what I feel like eating or drinking instead of some desire to make healthy choices or something, my intake is good-tasting spring water (the tap water here sometimes tastes of mud), decent black coffee, inexpensive tea, and [of course] beer.
My food has taken a turn for the bland, too.
I buy carrots and celery at the store to munch on, instead of a bag of cookies. Things like rice and beans and fish have an abundance of flavor that I wasn't able to appreciate before. For gatherings, I make a big relish tray full of fresh vegetables -- and I munch on them more than anyone else does.
I seldom buy breakfast cereal now, but I used to eat a lot of it -- and I'd load it up with more sugar. Last year I did buy some store-brand raisin bran but I found that it was too much of a sugar bomb to really enjoy as a meal. I couldn't make myself finish it; most of it wound up in the compost. (I did find some very plain bran flakes that I liked a lot better -- 12-year-old me would not have been impressed.)
This is all a bit weird to describe because the only deliberate decision involved was to try to save a bit of money on coffee-house coffee in my 30s.
But did that decision actually have anything to do with it? Or is this instead a tale as old as time itself, wherein: Tastes simply change?
(But yeah, I do enjoy an occasional sugar bomb. But only literally-occasionally. For instance: A single 12-ounce bottle of Coke is very nice sometimes. I probably drink as many as 2 or 3 of those in a whole year.)
Over the NHS recommended limit is better than zero caffeine for everyone. If their limit is correct is in question
Whether "those with severe mental illness" get more benefit seems unlikely biologically. But like everyone coffee is good for you.
The only point of research like this, since we know coffee is good, is finding the mechanisms. But it's highly open to p-hacking/experimental error, which is how universities work now. You should default to this is citation farming.