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Coffee: A Historic Beverage, And A Great Holiday Gift
Ah, coffee... a fantastic dark beverage that wakes us up in the morning. For some of us, it keeps us up during the day, or for late night study sessions. We drink it out of habit, we drink it from addiction, we drink it for flavor; whatever the...
Coffee For Your Health
Go Ahead…Have Some Coffee… Many of us rely on coffee to get us going in the mornings, wake us up in the afternoons, and prepare us for that special business meeting. Go ahead, have a cup of coffee. It’s much healthier than you may be thinking right...
Coffee Grinder: Grinding Coffee in a Jiffy!
A coffee grinder is an essential piece of coffee processing equipment. Grinding the coffee beans is an important step in coffee making. The perfect grind will enable you to enjoy the best cup of stimulating coffee. The 'golden rule' to coffee making...
Creating Inexpensive Gifts With Coffee Mugs
During the holidays you may become overwhelmed by the list of
people you need gifts for. When trying to find gifts it can be
difficult to get cute presents at inexpensive prices. The more
people on your list however, the more important cheap...
Gourmet Flavored Coffee
Coffee tastes great by itself, but for an extra special taste sensation, try gourmet flavored coffee. There are many flavoring substances which can be added to coffee to give your daily cup of Java an out of the ordinary flavor experience. Some...
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Coffee and Depression: Coffee as an Antidepressant! What?
Coffee and Depression:
When you grab that morning cup of java, you’re probably not thinking of it as an antidepressant. You’re just trying to get that morning pick me up to get your day going.
However, recent studies have shown that java really does function as an antidepressant, raising the spirits of people who regularly drink the stuff. It acts on the central nervous system and has mild antidepressant effects.
Coffee and depression studies have found that drinking it reduced the rate of suicide in the large demographic populations observed.
The first coffee and depression study that raised the topic of java as an antidepressant was done in 1993. In this study, a Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program study of 128,934 nurses found that java drinkers were significantly less likely to commit suicide than nondrinkers.
This Nurse’s Health Study on coffee and depression did not go so far as to establish a causal relationship between java drinking and the drop in the suicide rate. The study stated that it could be that the coffees itself had little to do with it, but that people who drink coffee share other characteristics that make them less likely to commit suicide.
A second study on coffee and depression, however, confirmed these controversial findings and went farther as to state that it was the coffee that dropped the suicide rate. This study was especially noteworthy, as it was large-scale and adjusted for confounding factors.
Published in the Archives of Internal Medicine in 1996, the study followed more than 86,000 registered nurses in the United States between 34 and 59 years of age for ten years. Dr. Ichiro Kawachi, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School who led this study, looked at the data from the Kaiser Permanente study hoping to discount their findings.
Instead of what he expected to find, he confirmed the original study’s results with his own: using coffee as an antidepressant reduced the suicide rate in these nurses.
Dr. Kawachi discovered that the nurses he studied who drank two to three cups of coffee a
day were one-third less likely to commit suicide as those who didn't drink any.
The nurses who drank more than four cups a day were 58% less likely to commit suicide than their colleagues who drank less. The coffee and depression study of female nurses found eleven suicides among those who drank two to three cups of caffeinated coffee per day, compared with twenty-one cases of suicide among those who said they almost never drank coffee.
However, Dr. Kawachi and others aren’t ready yet to use coffee as an antidepressant for clinical depression. At the minimum, Dr. Kawachi says that his study shows that drinking lots of coffee can’t be bad for your health.
Psychiatrists point out that people must understand that depression isn’t simply a state of mind; it is a very serious medical issue that cannot be resolved simply by drinking coffee.
And cardiologists, while they recommend to their patients with heart and other health problems to steer clear of caffeine, know that it’s not good for a patient’s mental health to do so immediately in a cold turkey manner. Instead, they recommend bringing down the coffee consumption gradually in order to avoid a severe state of depression due to the drop in caffeine and other antidepressants in coffee.
Whether it is the caffeine or something else, coffee does seem to have at least a mild antidepressant effect. The caffeine in coffee may have mood-elevating actions through effects on neurotransmitters such as dopamine and acetylcholine.
It is also possible that coffee drinking has social effects, such as increasing personal contacts and time spent socializing, that might reduce thoughts of suicide.
Reference: Kawachi, I., et al., "A prospective study of coffee drinking and suicide in women," Arch Intern Med (1996), 156(5):521-25
About the Author
Randy works with his son on Ultimate Coffees Info. Randy owned and operated a very successful storefront/mailorder business from 1988 to 2003. Currently full time owner/operator of several online businesses.
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