Recent Texas A&M paper examines health benefits, reveals much left to explore on coffee’s human health impact

Coffee is one of the most widely consumed beverages worldwide.

But it also has been associated with health benefits like decreased rates of Parkinson’s disease and Type 2 diabetes, as well as a lowered risk of some cancers, including colon, rectal and breast cancer. Although the general health benefits of coffee consumption are well known, its specific drivers are still being discovered.

A recently published review paper by Texas A&M University researchers examines the health benefits of coffee and reveals there is still much to explore about coffee’s impacts on human health.

Lead author on the publication in the National Library of Medicine of the National I nstitutes of Health’sNational Center for Biotechnology Information is Stephen Safe, D.Phil., Distinguished Professor and Sid Kyle Endowed Chair in Veterinary Toxicology in the Texas A&M School of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, VMBS. Safe is also a faculty member in the Texas A&M College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics.

The paper was stimulated by a recent collaborative study conducted by Safe and his colleague Robert Chapkin, Ph.D., Allen Endowed Chair in Nutrition and Chronic Disease Prevention and Distinguished Professor in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Department of Nutrition and Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics.

Chapkin also served as a co-author on the review paper along with Laurie Davidson, Ph.D., research scientist, and Jainish Kothari, graduate student, both in the Department of Nutrition. Additional coauthors from the VMBS include Srijana Upadhyay, senior research associate, and Amanuel Hailemariam, graduate student and research assistant.

The mechanics of coffee consumption

Safe said his main interest in this review paper was understanding the role coffee compounds play in various mechanisms within the human body.

“The mechanisms are really good to know because if you understand how something’s working, you get a better shot at understanding and harnessing coffee to improve health outcomes,” Safe explained.

One beneficial mechanism the researchers identified in a previous study was the fact that roasted coffee activates the aryl hydrocarbon receptor, AHR, in the human body. AHR plays a role in regulating metabolism and immunity, so, by activating AHR, roasted coffee boosts an individual’s conversion of food into energy and their ability to fight disease.

Safe and Chapkin also looked at coffee’s influence on NR4A, a receptor in the human body involved in the development of certain kinds of cancer, including colon and breast cancer.

“It turns out that a lot of natural products bind to the NR4A receptor,” Safe said. “It could be a contributor to the health effects not only of coffee but also of a vegetable-rich diet, though we don’t know that for sure.”

However, Safe explained that identifying receptors such as NR4A is an important step in developing treatments for diseases.

“Once a contributor to a disease has been identified, we can start developing drugs designed to block the expression of that contributor, thus stopping the disease in its tracks,” Safe said. “We can also do the reverse. If we identify something that’s helping fight a disease when activated, we can develop treatments that activate the disease fighting mechanism.”

The researchers also identified NrF2, an oxygen sensor in cells, as a mechanism that coffee consumption can activate. AHR enhances NrF2’s protective properties, which are positive for preventing diseases because they help keep oxygen levels in cells at a healthy level.

However, if you receive a diagnosis for a disease that is treated by enhancing the oxygen level in cells, coffee’s enhancement of NrF2 will counteract the drugs used to treat the illness.

“Some diseases are treated with therapeutics that increase reactive oxygen species (ROS),” Safe said. “ROS attacks the diseased cells until they die, thus eliminating the disease. So, NrF2 can be protective, but if you happen to get one of these diseases, it switches and can cause resistance to treatment.”

Double shot of cancer benefits

The review paper shared that caffeine’s energy and focus-boosting effect is the most known benefit of coffee consumption, but the 2 billion cups of joe consumed daily may also provide both chemotherapeutic and chemo-preventive benefits.

Most of coffee’s benefits are chemo-preventive, Chapkin and Safe said. Chemo-preventives help prevent the development of cancers. These are the same benefits vegetable-rich diets such as the Mediterranean diet provide. The chemo-preventive effects coffee has in the body help a person live longer while also preventing some cancers, although there are conflicting reports on benefits for some of these cancers in the scientific literature.

Looking forward, Safe and Chapkin are hopeful that future research will focus on these possible chemotherapeutic effects.

The chemotherapeutic aspects of coffee are very exciting, the two scientists agreed, saying while they haven’t been proven, it looks like there are some possibilities for clinical application of coffee extracts to be considered for treating some cancers.

The researchers indicated that if you read the coffee literature, you realize the positive effects of coffee go on and on, and a lot of them aren’t even known yet.

“We still have a lot of research to do, but I’ve been hooked on coffee for a long time and have never seen any reason to unhook myself,” Safe said. “It’s essentially a cooked vegetable with a wide range of health benefits.”

This story, written by Abagail Chartier and Rachel Knight, appeared on the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences news page.

PHOTO: Coffee pouring to cup surrounded by coffee beans (Photo: iStock – iWichy)

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