Time for coffee and tea
Coffee drinking and health
Unfortunately due to the popularity and prevalence of coffee its health aspects are very difficult to isolate and access. Even coffee itself is not very well defined! Because different coffee bean strains are grown under differing conditions and prepared in different ways, such as from ground or roasted beans, and brewed in many forms such as instant, decaffeinated, percolated, drip, pad or a multitude of other ways, it makes it almost impossible to study the complex range of constituents that may result.
Furthermore, from an epidemiological point of view, it is difficult to identify the appropriate means for quantifying the dosage of coffee that is in took by widely dispersed populations. There is not even a standadised measure for a cup of coffee. And, even if a standard sized cup of coffee did exist, the composition and concentrate of coffee bean extract finding its way into that standardised cup would vary in considerably.
An additional problem when analysing the health aspects of coffee is that it is strongly linked to other concomitant behaviours - such as having a cigarette or dunking a biscuit into the beverage, and these associations vary not only from region to region but also from one household to another.
Therefore, isolating coffee consumption in itself as a separate variable, quantifying the appropriate index of consumption and then correlating it with a particular health outcome is a formidable endeavor. However, the potential far-reaching outcome makes that fact almost imperative.
Caffeine as one major identifiable coffee component has been studied intensively. But Caffeine is just one amongst many hundreds of different compounds that make up coffee. Other compounds of the complex coffee mixture have also been identified and isolated, and experimental studies assessing the mutagenicity and carcinogenicity of purified components, as well as mixtures of compounds are ongoing.