Coffee appears to rewire the gut-brain connection(sciencedaily.com) |
Coffee appears to rewire the gut-brain connection(sciencedaily.com) |
Last year's wasn't funded by Scientific Information on Coffee
This paper (open): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-71264-8
Paper from 2024 (open): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-024-01858-9
That sounds hilarious. So I had to look. It's the ISIC: Institute for Scientific Information on Coffee, "compris[ing] five of the major European coffee companies: illycaffè, JDE Peet's, Lavazza, Paulig, and Tchibo."
https://www.coffeeandhealth.org/about-isic
But it's okay, because
> ISIC is dedicated to contributing and consolidating balanced scientific information on coffee consumption – providing a reference for professionals and authorities who address health and wellbeing. [---]
Though
> ISIC works with the European Coffee Federation as well as with national coffee associations in the following countries [---]
suggests they don't work with any tea or soda federations to compare the scentific effects of coffee to other beverages.
Main authors study neuroscience (Department of Anatomy and Neuroscience, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland,) so I bet the results are real, but as you point out, they knew that before even starting.
I have a feeling that everything about food and how people digest it are dependent on the person and any generalized articles like this are completely useless.
Or it just suggests people are creatures of habit and comforts :)
But the funding chain here is -
Major coffee companies illy | JDE Peet's | Lavazza | Paulig | Tchibo
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Hmm
As someone who it taking a break from coffee because of pervasive anxiety, and I am surprised how zen-like I am even two days in (among the migraines and anhedonia), this sentence from the abstract is so utterly wrong I won’t even waste my time with the rest.
Like, do they even understand the pathways and receptors that caffeine affects? You can say anything you like about caffeine, other than it is an anxiolytic. (Don’t get me started with the ‘coffee calms me down because I have ADHD’ trope)
With coffee we’re in the phase we’ve gone through with red wine, where every day a new article claimed that a glass per day would cure a new illness and make you live 120 years.
When I cycle back to coffee, I find myself reverting to a maladaptive redlining and recovery rhythm. I suspect this has carved a compulsion for the work-hard-party-hard glow so prevalent in my younger years.
This pattern doesn't hold at all, for me, with mate or oolongs.
Also from what I can tell in my skimming the study mostly focused on small (decaf) amounts of caffeine in the gut biome. There are still more components of coffee such as bitter compounds that presumably have other effects.
What is material is that coffee has a lot of interesting components beside caffeine.
However, I believe my rapid fight/flight gut emptying impulse after a cup probably is the caffeine.
(I have disregulated gut, my gut man (who said the disposable sigmoidoscope revolutionised his speciality) said I was just shy of IBS)
At least in my own anecdata of IBS, caffeine alone does not have a laxative-like effect for me. I have noticed some but not all strongly bitter foods do, and heard a theory once that some flavoring compound that tastes bitter may be subtly enough like gall passes through the stomach to confuse the gut into thinking there may be a gall leak and to flush the system faster. That certainly sounds right to my anecdata, but also part of why I think I crave bitter foods sometimes (as an IBS-C to IBS-D switch/trigger).