Which Coffee Is Best vs Aging?

First of all, let’s start by saying that for most people, moderate coffee consumption is a net positive for good health.

See for example our mythbusting edition about this: The Bitter Truth About Coffee (or is it?)

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

As well as other benefits, such as 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.

In some regards, though, it really does make a health difference which kind of coffee you go for: Different Coffees, Different Mood Benefits

And it’s not just about caffeine content either; the way you make it (espresso, drip-filter, French press, Turkish, instant, and more) can be relevant too: Make Your Coffee Heart-Healthier!

So, what’s this about different kinds of coffee vs aging?

The instant you filter it out…

Researchers (Dr. Hui Hu et al.) analyzed data from 49,414 participants (the average age was 56.4 years, 44.3% were women), to examine whether (and if so, how) different types of coffee were associated with biological aging.

Specifically, they assessed three important markers of biological aging, including relative leukocyte telomere length (rLTL), PhenoAge Acceleration, and Klemera-Doubal Method Biological Age Acceleration (KDM-BA Accel).

^{If you’re curious about more ways to measure biological aging, see: Age & Aging: What Can (And Can’t) We Do About It?}

Back to Dr. Hu (don’t tell UNIT) and her team, the results were clear:

• Filtered coffee: higher intake was significantly associated with lower biological age-acceleration scores and generally longer telomeres, thus slower biological aging.
• Instant coffee: higher intake was significantly associated with higher biological age-acceleration scores and shorter telomeres, thus faster biological aging.
• Other coffee types: no significant associations with biological aging were found.

That said the differences linked to instant coffee were relatively small, corresponding to about 0.1–0.2 years of biological age acceleration, making the individual clinical impact modest.

You may be thinking “but you said significantly”, and yes we did, but that is about statistical significance (i.e. p<0.05) and has that specific meaning in science, and is not the same thing as saying “and the difference was huge”. See also: How Science News Outlets Can Lie To You (Yes, Even If They Cite Studies!) ← at 10almonds we take as much care as we can to be clear about what things do and don’t mean, but it’s good to understand how to recognize certain things that could be misleading, as it can absolutely happen that your humble writer here might think something’s obvious when it’s not, and besides, it’s a good skill to have!

When it came to the filtered coffee though, the differences in the benefits were rather larger:

❝In multivariable adjustment model, compared with drinking no coffee, instant coffee consumption was associated with greater KDM-BA Accel (0–1 cup per day: β = 0.050 [95% confidence interval (CI), −0.072 to 0.173]; 1–3 cups per day: β = 0.092 [−0.025 to 0.209]; >3 cups per day: β = 0.166 [0.006 to 0.326]; P-trend = 0.002). The negative association between filtered coffee consumption and KDM-BA Accel was observed (0–1 cup per day: β = −0326 [−0.437 to −0.215]; 1–3 cups per day: β = −0.762 [−0.879 to −0.646]; >3 cups per day: β = −1.118 [−1.415 to −0.820]; P-trend < 0.001).❞

Translating from sciencese:

• Instant coffee: the β values rose from 0.050 to 0.166 as intake increased, pointing to slightly faster biological aging
• Filtered coffee: the β values became increasingly negative, from −0.326 to −1.118, pointing to progressively slower biological aging

And for absolute clarity, something’s “β value” is a statistical estimate of how much an outcome tends to increase or decrease in association with a given factor, after accounting for other variables included in the analysis.

To give examples of those, Dr. Hu’s study adjusted for quite a lot of factors, including age, sex, smoking, alcohol intake, physical activity, BMI, socioeconomic status, chronic diseases, whether coffee was decaffeinated, and whether sugar, other sweeteners, and/or milk/cream were added.

You can find the paper in full, here: Discrepancies between instant and filtered coffee in biological aging: evidence from the UK Biobank

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?

Enjoy!