A little while back, Ladders covered a preliminary study on the health benefits associated with filtered coffee.
That particular analysis focused on early death, more specifically positing that applying a filter to your morning brew can lower one’s risk of death from any cause by as much as 15%.
A new paper published in the Journal of Internal Medicine furthers this research with some compelling new finds.
According to the researchers, filtered coffee (as opposed to boiled coffee) can dramatically reduce one’s risk of developing type 2 diabetes.
“Metabolomics is a fantastic tool, not just for capturing the intake of specific foods and drinks, but also for studying the effects that that intake has on people’s metabolism. We can derive important information on the mechanisms behind how certain foods influence disease risk,” says Lin Shi, Postdoctoral researcher and the lead author of the study.
Filtered Coffee vs. Boiled Coffee: Metabolic Association with type 2 diabetes
The new data set is actually derived from a meta-analysis of research conducted on a group of Swedish subjects initially published in the early 1990s.
Dr. Shi and her team of researchers from the Chalmers University of Technology and Umeå Universit, honed in on specific biomarkers drawn from the blood of the study’s participants.
After all of the samples were collected, the authors segmented the blood of those who habitually consumed boiled coffee from those who habitually consumed filtered coffee.
With the help of the biomarkers established before the study period, the researchers were able to demonstrate that people who drank two to three cups of filtered coffee a day reduced their risk of developing type 2 diabetes by as much 60% compared to those who drank less than one cup of filtered coffee a day. Consumption of boiled coffee had no effect on type 2 diabetes risk in the study.
The strength of the research survived on the presence of a molecule studied to increase one’s risk for developing cardiovascular and molecular diseases called, diterpenes. Filters catch diterpenes, build coffee doesn’t.
From the report:
“It has been shown that when you filter coffee, the diterpenes are captured in the filter. As a result, you get the health benefits of the many other molecules present, such as different phenolic substances. In moderate amounts, caffeine also has positive health effects.”
Thankfully, in most countries, filtered coffee is the standard mode of preparation.
However, the authors hastened to mention in several media releases that the health impacts of coffee do not depend exclusively on the method of preparation. In fact, even the health effects associated with filtered coffee can be augmented based on other additional factors. The authors intend to conduct more research to determine how their findings vary with different quantities of coffee beans applied to a brew, alongside other ways in which the beverage is managed in general.
“We have identified specific molecules — ‘biomarkers’ — in the blood of those taking part in the study, which indicate the intake of different sorts of coffee. These biomarkers are then used for analysis when calculating type 2 diabetes risk. Our results now clearly show that filtered coffee has a positive effect in terms of reducing the risk of developing type 2 diabetes. But boiled coffee does not have this effect,” says Rikard Landberg, Professor in Food Science at Chalmers, and Affiliated Professor at the Department of Public Health and Clinical Medicine at Umeå University.
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