A Surprising Coffee Finding

There's a genuinely massive study that came out a few months ago looking at the intake of coffee and the relationship that it has to dementia. But what was really unique about this study is that they followed people over 40 plus years. I'm not going to bore you with all the details, but ultimately what they found is that people who consume caffeinated coffee tend to have reduced risk of dementia up to three cups per day. Now usually I get the question of well what is a cup? It's 240 milliliters standard cup. Anything beyond three cups did not show further improvement or further association with improvement. Now another thing that they looked at was decaf coffee to find out that relationship and see if it follows a similar trend. Fascinatingly what they found is that no it doesn't follow the same trend. In fact, decaf coffee either had no relationship or in certain metrics and I need to be careful about how I explain this that there's subjective methods and objective methods. Now typically we rely more on objective methods or measurement methods but in the subjective measures so the feelings of uh more forgetfulness and things of that nature people felt worse when they were using decaf coffee. And just to clarify this is not people going from caffeinated coffee to decaf coffee. Of course they would feel worse. This is people who have been consistently consuming decaf coffee for a long time. So then I was interested to find out if other studies have shown similar results. So maybe not exactly in that same population, but in other populations. And it turns out that actually, yeah, there are other studies that have looked at decaf coffee and caffeinated coffee and shown the exact same relationship or at least very similar where caffeinated coffee seems to robustly show protection against dementia or at least again I should say a relationship with uh reduced risk of dementia. And decaf coffee shows no such relationship. usually not a negative relationship as in worse dementia risk, but a neutral relationship. I have to admit that was pretty surprising result for me because I was under the impression that the majority of coffeey's benefits come from the polyphenols that come along with it, not necessarily the caffeine. But it turns out that may not be the