What Coffee Does To Hormones & Body Composition

Regular 10almonds readers will remember when we wrote about how coffee appears to be protective against frailty in older age. We say “appears to be”, because it was a longitudinal study and so technically we cannot say categorically that the link was causal, but the association is very strong, to the point that it’d take quite some explaining if it’s anything other than the coffee consumption that caused it.

You can read about that here: Coffee vs Frailty!

There’s a lot that coffee does for us besides that, for example:

• 43% reduced risk of liver cancer for coffee-drinkers
• 53% reduced suicide risk for coffee-drinkers
• 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*

*See also: The Other Thing Coffee Does To Your Blood Sugars

We’ll come back to that last one shortly, but first, let’s give an overview of…

Coffee, Hormones, Muscles, & Fat

A simplistic guess would say “coffee is a stimulant, so it will increase the metabolism in general”.

That simplistic guess is in fact correct, and/but there’s more to it than that!

Researchers (Dr. Luca Verroest et al.) analyzed data from 2,264 participants from the Northern Finland Birth Cohort 1966, After accounting for possible confounding variables such as BMI, education level, smoking status, physical activity, and alcohol intake, there were some interesting differences between different levels of coffee intake.

Firstly, when it came to sex hormones, there were sex differences:

• Women’s hormone profile: greater coffee consumption was associated mainly with higher sex hormone-binding globulin (SHBG) and lower free testosterone and lower free androgen index (FAI).
• Men’s hormone profile: greater coffee consumption was associated with higher total testosterone, bioavailable testosterone, and SHBG, but lower free testosterone and FAI.

Other things held true regardless of sex. For example, higher coffee intake was associated with lower circulating branched-chain amino acids (BCAAs) in both men and women. This is improtant, because chronically* elevated BCAAs have been associated with insulin resistance and increased type 2 diabetes risk.

^{*It’s really only chronically elevated BCAAs that are a problem, though. Acutely elevated BCAAs, in contrast, can sometimes be beneficial, as per What To Eat, Take, And Do Before A Workout!}

And, indeed, greater coffee consumption was also associated with a more favorable glucose-insulin profile. This makes sense, due to what we wrote about in: Another Benefit To Coffee: Insulin Sensitivity!

And as for body composition, people who drank more coffee tended to have less total body fat and visceral fat (on which note, see: Can We Do Fat Redistribution? ← the answer is “yes” and this article explains how) and more skeletal muscle, even though BMI was similar between coffee-intake groups. Which is not surprising, given how unhelpful BMI is for most medical purposes (see: When BMI Doesn’t Quite Measure Up)

You can read her paper in full, here: Associations of habitual coffee intake with testosterone and cardiometabolic markers: the Northern Finland birth cohort 1966 study

Not a fan of coffee?

If you’re not a fan of coffee, but also not a fan of aging, high blood pressure, frailty, cancer, Alzheimer’s, suicide, diabetes, atrial fibrillation, and more, fear not; there is a supplement option available:

Green Coffee Bean Extract: Coffee Benefits Without The Coffee?

Want to learn more?

For more about the benefits of coffee in general, see: The Bitter Truth About Coffee (or is it?)

And to learn much more deeply about the insulin considerations, check out this excellent book that we reviewed:

Why We Get Sick – by Dr. Benjamin Bikman ← this is about insulin resistance, and, importantly, the invisible insulin resistance that precedes blood sugar imbalances by many years (it goes unnoticed because the pancreas will dutifully keep cranking out more and more insulin to keep the blood sugars stable, until one day it just can’t keep up anymore, and then and only then does prediabetes get diagnosed).

Enjoy!