Machine-Dispensed Coffee & Heart Health

We have written before about the health benefits (and risks) of coffee; for most people, the benefits far outweigh the risks, but individual cases may vary:

The Bitter Truth About Coffee (or is it?) ← this is a mythbusting edition

Speaking of bitterness; coffee has abundant polyphenols, which means…

• Coffee is the world’s biggest source of antioxidants
• 65% reduced risk of Alzheimer’s for coffee-drinkers
• 67% reduced risk of type 2 diabetes for coffee-drinkers
• 43% reduced risk of liver cancer for coffee-drinkers
• 53% reduced suicide risk for coffee-drinkers

See also: Why Bitter Is Better: Enjoy Bitter Foods For Your Heart & Brain ← while it says foods in the title, this does cover coffee too.

For mythbusting on caffeine specifically, enjoy: Caffeine: Cognitive Enhancer Or Brain-Wrecker?

There are also gut health benefits from drinking coffee, and what’s good for our gut is invariably good for our heart and brain:

Coffee & Your Gut ← gut bacteria do not, by the way, have a preference about how you make your coffee or whether it is caffeinated or not

The latest science on coffee and heart health

Specifically, on coffee and cholesterol levels, so for a quick primer on cholesterol, check out: Demystifying Cholesterol

High total cholesterol, and especially high LDL (“bad” cholesterol) is generally associated with cardiovascular disease, for the reasons outlined in the link above.

Recently, researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden examined the levels of cafestol and kahweol, which are both diterpenes, substances known to increase cholesterol levels, in coffee made by various methods, including those dispensed from coffee machines in workplaces.

Two samples were taken from each machine every 2–3 weeks, and the most common kinds of machines produced the highest concentrations of diterpenes. These machines are the ones that push hot water through a small amount of ground coffee, through a wide-gauge filter, dispensing coffee into a cup in about 30 seconds.

Actual espresso machines, which work on the same principle but usually with a finer filter, higher pressure, and slower dispensing of the drink, had widely varying results, quite possibly because there is (in most machines) a human element in how tightly the ground coffee is packed into the metal filter basket.

Simple filter coffee, whether made in a coffee percolator machine or made using the pour-over method, had the lowest concentrations of diterpenes.

You can read about this study here:

Cafestol and kahweol concentrations in workplace machine coffee compared with conventional brewing methods

However!

We were curious as to how, exactly, cafestol and kahweol increase cholesterol levels.

It turns out that research in this area has been scant, because most mice aren’t affected by it in the way that most humans are, which has limited mouse model studies.

Scant does not mean non-existent, though, and the answer came by virtue of transgenic mice (specifically, apolipoprotein (apo) E*3-Leiden transgenic mice, which do have the same reaction to cafestol as humans), the paper title sums it up nicely:

Cafestol Increases Serum Cholesterol Levels in Apolipoprotein E*3-Leiden Transgenic Mice by Suppression of Bile Acid Synthesis

You may be wondering: what does suppression of bile acid synthesis have to do with cholesterol levels?

To oversimplify it a bit: cafestol messes with cholesterol metabolism by interfering with the enzymes involved in cholesterol metabolism (specifically, regulatory enzymes found in bile acid).

As to what it actually does in that regard: it reduces LDLR (LDL receptor) mRNA levels by 37% (that figure’s an average of the specific enzymes, sterol 27-hydroxylase and oxysterol 7α-hydroxylase, which were reduced by 32% and 48%, respectively).

Why this matters in practical terms: cafestol does not add any cholesterol to our systems, it inhibits our ability to clear LDL cholesterol, thus promoting raised LDL cholesterol levels.

In other words: if you have little or no dietary cholesterol (no dietary cholesterol, for example, if you are vegan), then your body will only have the cholesterol that it made for itself because it needed it, and as such, the body won’t need to do the same kind of clean-up job that it would if you had that coffee with a double cheeseburger with extra bacon.

As such, if you have little or no dietary cholesterol, cafestol is unlikely to have anything like the same effect on cholesterol levels.

Disclaimer: this latter is technically a hypothesis, but based on sound reasoning:

It’s the same logic that says “if you do not drink alcohol, then eating a durian fruit, which inhibits aldehyde dehydrogenase, which the body uses to metabolize alcohol, will not cause alcohol-related problems for you”.

Want to know more?

We wrote previously on coffee and cafestol, along with some suggestions:

Health-Hack Your Coffee To Make Your Coffee Heart-Healthier!

Enjoy!