Specific hot drink helps you avoid 11 serious conditions and 'age better'
Women who drink coffee every day age better, according to a new study. Researchers found that women who enjoy three small daily cups of caffeinated coffee in middle age stay sharp, strong and mentally well as they get older.
But tea and decaffeinated coffee didn't show the same benefits while colas were "strongly associated" with less healthy ageing, according to the findings of the study that followed thousands of women for 30 years. Study author Dr Sara Mahdavi said: 'While past studies have linked coffee to individual health outcomes, our study is the first to assess coffee's impact across multiple domains of aging over three decades.
'The findings suggest that caffeinated coffee - not tea or decaf - may uniquely support aging trajectories that preserve both mental and physical function."
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Dr Mahdavi, a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in the US, and an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto, Canada, said: 'Our study has several key strengths. In addition to the large sample size and 30 years of follow-up, we assessed several different aspects of longevity and healthy aging as well as very comprehensive information on nutritional and lifestyle habits that were collected every four years after the initiation of the study.'
The study included 47,513 women with dietary and health data collected since 1984. The research team assessed caffeine intake using questionnaires that included consumption of top contributors of caffeine such as coffee, tea, cola and decaffeinated coffee.
Healthy ageing was defined as living to age 70 or older, being free from 11 major chronic diseases, maintaining physical function, having good mental health, and showing no cognitive impairment or memory complaints. After 30 years, the research team estimated how the likelihood of healthy ageing changed for every 80mg of caffeine that the study participants consumed per day.
They also examined specific drinks including coffee, tea, decaffeinated coffee, per eight-ounce cup, and cola, per 12-ounce glass. The analysis accounted for other factors that might influence healthy ageing including body weight, smoking, alcohol use, physical activity, education level and protein in the diet.
By 2016, 3,706 of the women in the study met all the requirements for being considered healthy agers. In middle age, from 45 to 60, those women typically consumed an average of 315 mg of caffeine per day - about the amount in three small cups of coffee or 1.5 large cups by today's standards.
More than 80% of that caffeine came from regular coffee consumption. For women in the healthy agers group, each extra cup of coffee per day was tied to a 2% to 5% higher chance of doing well later in life, up to five small cups per day, or about 2.5 cups according to today's measures.
The research team didn't find any significant association between drinking decaffeinated coffee or tea with an increased likelihood of healthy ageing. And each additional small glass of pop - another major source of caffeine - was associated with a 20% to 26% lower likelihood of healthy ageing.
The researchers say the findings indicate that not all sources of caffeine confer benefits. Dr Mahdavi said: 'These results, while preliminary, suggest that small, consistent habits can shape long-term health.
'Moderate coffee intake may offer some protective benefits when combined with other healthy behaviours such as regular exercise, a healthy diet and avoiding smoking. While this study adds to prior evidence suggesting coffee intake may be linked with healthy ageing, the benefits from coffee are relatively modest compared to the impact of overall healthy lifestyle habits and warrant further investigation.'
The researchers note that, in general, up to two cups of coffee per day should be safe and potentially beneficial for most people. Beyond that, drinking more may offer additional benefits for some - but may not be healthy for others.
Dr. Mahdavi and her colleagues have shown in a previous study that genetic variation can influence the relationship between caffeine intake and health outcomes, so more caffeine isn't always better- particularly for people with lower caffeine tolerance or specific genetic susceptibility.
The team now plan to investigate how specific bioactive compounds in coffee interact with genetic and metabolic ageing markers, especially in women. They say that understanding those mechanisms could guide personalised medicine approaches to develop diets that support healthy ageing.
Dr Mahdavi presented the findings at the annual meeting of the American Society for Nutrition in Orlando, Florida.
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Hamilton Spectator
21 hours ago
- Hamilton Spectator
Black Canadians have highest avoidable hospitalization rates: StatCan data
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'Without the … race-specific data, you can't really get to the nuances of what the particular issues are within a community and what it means for a community to be disproportionately affected, either by a health condition or by the outcome of treatment for a health condition,' Maxwell said. Massaquoi said Black health-care advocates have 'constantly' begged for better race-based data collection. 'What we want to see as members of the Black community are the interventions that are going to be developed and designed so we're no longer just getting this trauma type of data that keeps telling us over and over in every manner how badly we're doing.' This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 29, 2025.
Yahoo
21 hours ago
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is a senior reporter for Vox's Future Perfect section, with a focus on animal welfare and the future of meat. Factory farming is a particularly wicked problem to solve. Despite strong public concern for cruelty to farmed animals and large swathes of Americans telling pollsters that they're trying to cut back on meat, we keep eating more of it. And research has shown that it's nearly impossible to persuade most people otherwise. But a new study, which hasn't yet been published and is currently under review at an academic journal, might complicate that consensus. Learning how the sausage gets made In the experiment, University of Toronto professors Lisa Kramer and Peter Landry recruited 1,149 students and separated them into two groups. One group watched a 16-minute clip from the harrowing animal rights documentary Dominion about the treatment of pigs in meat production, while a control group watched a video about the role mushrooms play in forest ecosystems. In surveys taken before the study, immediately after watching the video, and a week later, participants were asked to choose a protein — bacon, chicken, steak, tofu, or none — to add to a meal. Before watching the video, 90.1 percent of students chose meat in their meal; a week after watching the video, 77.9 percent did — a 12.2 percent decline. Demand for pork, specifically, fell more sharply. 'Turns out, it's harder to order meat after watching Dominion,' Seth Ariel Green, a research scientist at Stanford University's Humane and Sustainable Food Lab, wrote in a blog about the study. 'And it's especially harder to order pork after watching the segment on pigs.' (Green didn't work on the study but did provide the authors feedback on its design.) Plenty of researchers have shown videos similar to Dominion to study participants and found little to no effect. So what made this one different? Kramer and Landry say it could simply be the high-quality nature of the film. It was filmed in high definition and artfully edited, with close-up shots of distressed pigs, while most other factory farm footage is low-quality and shaky. It's a disturbing and unflinching look at industrial pig farming, though the narrator — actor Rooney Mara — speaks with a flat tone, as she carefully guides the viewer through practices that, on their face, should be illegal but are common and lawful. Some of those practices include: Confining pigs in tiny crates for virtually their entire lives Slamming runt piglets head-first into concrete as a form of cheap euthanasia Removing piglets' tails, teeth, and testicles without pain relief Using carbon dioxide gas chambers to knock pigs unconscious prior to slaughter, which can cause extreme suffering What's more, the clip that participants watched makes no appeal for them to eat less meat or more plant-based foods, leaving viewers to come to their own conclusions. 'The task of connecting the experiences of pigs on industrial-scale farms (as depicted in the video) to one's own consumption choices is left entirely to the viewer,' Kramer and Landry wrote in the paper. (A lot of studies on the impacts of factory-farming documentaries use advocacy videos that directly ask the viewer to eat less meat.) The study certainly has limits. For one, the average participant was 22 years old and participants skewed slightly female; young people and women are both groups that are more likely to be concerned about cruelty to farmed animals. And it only followed the participants for one week after the experiment. Lastly, researchers didn't track what participants actually ate. Instead, the students indicated which protein they would add to a meal, with the understanding that they had a roughly 50 percent chance of winning a voucher for the meal they chose at a university cafeteria. At first, this struck me as a poor proxy for real-world behavior. But the researchers noted that another study that used a similar voucher approach and tracked what students actually ate found little discrepancy. All this suggests that persuading individuals to eat less meat — a goal that many in the animal advocacy movement have largely given up on — might not be as hopeless as previously thought. Why animal rights groups largely gave up on trying to change people's diets The University of Toronto study results pleasantly surprised Green, who researches how to move society away from factory farming. For a time, he had been convinced that efforts to persuade people to eat less meat — especially with appeals to animal welfare — were ineffective. His beliefs were informed by his research: Late last year, he and some colleagues published a meta-analysis, which is currently under peer review, looking at more than three dozen rigorous studies designed to persuade people to eat less meat. Overall, the studies found little to no effect. (It's worth noting, however, that a few studies involving much lengthier interventions, like reading an essay and joining a 50-minute group discussion or sitting through a lecture, have demonstrated sizable effects). This story was first featured in the Processing Meat newsletter Sign up here for Future Perfect's biweekly newsletter from Marina Bolotnikova and Kenny Torrella, exploring how the meat and dairy industries shape our health, politics, culture, environment, and more. Have questions or comments on this newsletter? Email us at futureperfect@ Green's findings align with a change in the animal rights movement that took hold around a decade ago. Since the 1970s, animal advocates have poured a lot of resources into persuading people to go vegetarian or vegan. Organizations ran expensive advertising campaigns, handed out millions of pamphlets at universities, lectured in classrooms, and penned letters to the editor and op-eds in newspapers, among many other tactics. But in spite of all the effort, American meat consumption kept rising. By 2015, the largest animal advocacy organizations were shifting their focus toward political and corporate campaigns to ban some of the most egregious factory-farm practices, like tiny cages for pigs and egg-laying hens. Some groups also advocated for technological change — namely, making plant-based meat taste better, more affordable, and more widely available. The idea was that instead of trying to influence one person at a time, which had proven so difficult, they'd instead change the food system. The pivot produced a lot of tangible progress for animals: Over a dozen states have restricted cages for farmed animals, and plant-based meat tastes better and is more widely available than ever. But I've wondered whether animal advocates have given up on public persuasion too soon, and in turn, made it harder to maintain their hard-won institutional and technological progress. Animal advocates in Canada protest the cages that many egg-laying hens are confined in. Jo-Anne McArthur / We Animals Hens in battery cages, which are so small the animals can't spread their wings for their entire lives. Shatabdi Chakrabarti / FIAPO / We Animals Progress won through corporate or political campaigns might struggle to withstand backlash 'if there isn't also culture change happening and people's attitudes shifting' about factory farming, Laura Driscoll, a social scientist who works at the Stray Dog Institute — a foundation that funds groups working to reform the food system — told me. For example, plant-based meat sales jumped significantly between the late 2010s and early 2020s, but they've recently dipped back down. There might be a bigger market for these products, and more consumers might be immune to the fallacious argument that they're overly processed, if more people were persuaded of the ills of factory farming. Some states are now rolling back animal welfare laws that advocates had previously persuaded them to adopt, while some members of Congress are pushing to eliminate all state-level cage bans. Many food companies that pledged to eliminate eggs from caged hens in their supply chain aren't following through. In the absence of a broader base of voters and consumers who see factory farming as an important social issue, corporations and politicians know they can backslide without much resistance. The art of persuasion Compared to straightforward metrics like how many pigs are still trapped in cages, culture change is 'harder to understand and harder to measure,' Driscoll said, so it's hard to know how much animal rights groups should invest in it. And if it works, it takes a lot of time and repeated exposure to get there. A study participant may not alter their meat consumption after watching one video or reading an essay, but they might change over time if they hear about it enough — and hear persuasive messages that appeal to them. Currently, people are receiving very few messages about factory farming or meat reduction, as it's rarely covered in the news or discussed by politicians. Videos about the issue hardly ever go viral, and animal advocacy groups have pulled back from education and persuasion. Meanwhile, as Green told me, consumers are inundated with messages telling them to eat more meat. Some of those messages are explicit, like fast food advertisements or influencers telling us we need more (animal) protein, to implicit ones, like recipe videos on social media or our friends and family members eating a standard American diet rich in meat. Meat companies also mislead consumers to believe farmed animals are treated much better than they actually are. It's hard to imagine the public making meaningful reductions in meat consumption or advocating for significant changes to factory farming in this political, social, and information ecosystem. As researchers are prone to saying, more research is needed to know what could persuade more people on this issue: 'There's just not that much great research out there,' Green said. 'If you're a researcher in this field and you want to make a contribution, it's not that hard to be the first person to do something.' The case for both dietary change and meat industry reforms can be made persuasively. Based on the Dominion study, it might only take 16 minutes of an unvarnished look into factory farms for it to break through to some people. In today's crowded attention environment, capturing those 16 minutes of people's time will be harder than ever, but Green said it's still worth the effort. 'I think that persuasion is a beautiful thing where we try to convince people using reason and argument, and take them seriously' as moral agents, he said. 'I do not want to give up on this.'
