Daily coffee conserves DNA

I sometimes tell my students there’s a “bad voice” out there that can sneak into your head and speak to you. That doesn’t make you a bad person.

Unless you listen to it.

That voice spoke to me New Year’s Day morning.

I was up and about early, feeling sleep-deprived and a bit punch drunk. My fractured left femur had hit me all night with jabs of pain where the titanium rod and screws forced the fracture together. That, paired with such a swelling in my calf and foot that both felt like balloons about to burst, made for a pugilistic night.

I pushed my walker into the kitchen and did what I always do when I spend time at my dad’s house: make him breakfast. Sometime during the chopping of the Vienna sausage and the scrambling of the eggs, a terrible toothache-type ache from the fracture of the femur radiated throughout my leg.

And I got dizzy. Really dizzy.

I stopped cooking and held on to the kitchen counter. I needed to sit down. Immediately.

That’s when the bad voice spoke to me.

It said what I imagine it has said to you on other less-dire occasions: “There’s absolutely no way you can work out today.”

So how do you respond to the bad voice suddenly in your head? I opened my mouth, but didn’t say a word. I opened it to drink coffee.

Lots and lots of coffee.

Eight strong nerve-jangling cups of a half-caff blend.

Prior to that day, I tended to consume three or four cups of half-caff two or three times a week before my most important bicycle rides or weightlifting workouts. (FYI: Although straight caffeine has been found to improve cycling and other forms of exercise even more than caffeine in coffee in scientific studies, I like a hot beverage in the morning, so I save the straight stuff for bicycle races.)

As I lay in the hospital the day I fractured my femur, I occupied my mind by creating a recovery plan. Since scientific studies show you develop a tolerance to caffeine, I decided to abstain from it during my rehab to give those first real rides outside on the bike some extra juice.

So much for that plan.

Because that day’s caffeine-enhanced rehab went far better than I could have ever imagined, I again had eight cups before rehab the next day. And the next.

The estimated 500 milligrams of caffeine was far more than I wanted to ingest occasionally, let alone daily, so I cut back slowly with the goal of drinking coffee the way I used to by the time I was healthy enough to return to school.

So much for that plan, too.

To this day, in fact, I’m consuming about 18 ounces of a strong half caff every morning, and I’m not sure that I’ll ever change.

But that doesn’t mean I’ve become a weak-willed wussy who needs a drug — albeit a mild one — to work out. It means I’ve stumbled upon research that suggests I should’ve been drinking that amount daily years ago.

In a study published in the November 2018 issue of the European Journal of Nutrition, 100 former coffee drinkers went totally cold turkey for a month. They drank no coffee and the researchers made sure that their diets delivered no other sources of caffeine as well.

Once totally decaffeinated, extensive blood work was done. Half of the hundred then resumed drinking about 17 ounces (500 milliliters) of coffee a day. The others drank water instead.

One month later after all the subjects were tested again, the researchers discovered that the coffee drinkers had a 23% reduction in DNA damage when compared to the water drinkers.

DNA damage is no good. At best, it simply accelerates the rate at which you age. At worst, it leads to disease.

Moreover, prior studies show that regular coffee consumption decreases the likelihood that you develop heart disease and diabetes, as well as a number of nasty neurological diseases: Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s, multiple sclerosis, and epilepsy.

Now a recent study performed at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and published this January in the Journal of Functional Foods found that rats on a high-fat, high-sugar diet gained 16 percent less weight and 22 percent less body fat when given caffeine extracted from mate tea in an amount similar to what you get drinking four cups of coffee per day when compared to rats on the same diet given a decaffeinated mate tea extract.

The researchers determined that weight gain was mitigated because caffeine actually alters the gene expression that makes weight gain and fat storage more likely.

With evidence like this, it just makes sense to include a cup of coffee or two into your daily routine.

The caveat, of course, is that you can overdo it. While some people are extremely sensitive to caffeine, most can consume 400 milligrams of it without any adverse effects.

Up intake to 600 milligrams or more, though, and the likelihood of headaches, high blood pressure, and insomnia increases.