A recent story in the Wall Street Journal highlights some significant benefits to drinking coffee. Also a look at the new “anti-energy” drinks like Drank, containing calming herbs like chamomile, melatonin, valerian root and rose hip. Dr Inaba comments include the every-few-decades cycling of the kind of drugs that are popular.
Transcript (edited):
CNS: Hi and welcome once again to the CNS Addiction Podcast. I’m Howard LaMere, here with Dr Darryl Inaba. One of the topics we focused on recently was the negative aspects of coffee and caffeine, and here is an article in the (December 31, 2009) Wall Street Journal about the positive aspects of coffee.
DARRYL: Quite a surprising story, an amazing one published by the WSJ which is fairly investigative and conservative in their reporting, and they published this just before Christmas, when people are gearing up for the Holidays – the after-dinner coffees, and coffees during the day, so it was good timing. Contrary to many older studies which outline the negative aspects, the hazards and the addictive properties of coffee, this study showed positive results, amazing results from the practice of drinking coffee. Six cups of standard coffee lowered the risk of prostate cancer, 5 cups lowered the risk of Alzheimers by 65% in a Finnish study that alone is enough to inspire me to go back to drinking coffee after I have been clean from coffee for some 30 something years. I havent touched a drop of coffee because when I start I cant seem to stop, Ill go way above 6 cups, Ill go up to 20 cups a day. But if 5 cups per day can lower the risk of Alzheimers disease by 65% that is saying something. It also cuts the possibility of stroke in women, and reduced the risk of developing Type II diabetes, which impacts a huge number of people in the United States. Close to 80 million people are pre-diabetic or diabetic type IIs so if 4 cups a day can cut that by 25 35 %, thats a huge health benefit.
The study also claims coffee cuts the risk of gallstones, and lowers the risk of committing suicide. That surprised me because one of the problems with drinking coffee in excess is the crash. According to this study, people that drink at least 2 cups of coffee a day cut the risk of suicide by 60%. All these positive things are quite amazing. The older studies found increased hypertension high blood pressure, cardiac or heart irritability with a propensity to develop irregular heart beat, increased stroke risk, and risk of miscarriage. A recent study says that pregnant women who drink 3 cups a day increase the risk of miscarriage. A lot of major hazards, GI irritability, maybe even some cancers of the stomach are on the opposite side of these health benefits. So the jury is still out about if its positively good for you, or positively bad for you, but it seems like theres a lot of good news about coffee drinking.
CNS: How are these studies conducted, its hard to do a regular double-blind test.
DARRYL: This is purely anecdotal. These are just reports – asking questions of people, and thats why these studies are controversial. Researchers will ask people how many cups of coffee they drink a day, over how long a period of time, because they want to gage results on a longitudinal basis, to see what risks are connected. A lot of people aren’t going to remember how many cups of coffee they drank over the last ten years. And people are either stimulus-augmenters, or stimulus-reducers, I find very few people who are stimulus-normal. And that means, some people are going to exaggerate – think they drank a higher number, and some will be stimulus-reducers; thinking they drink a lesser number per day.
CNS: So what do make of the effect you mentioned of the stimulant effect on blood pressure – high blood pressure and heart disease – it sounds like its very contradictory. The article also mentions other substances beside caffeine in coffee, which might have a counteracting effect.
DARRYL: Caffeine is linked to increases in ergotamine, which is implicated in a number of health issues, so there is a concern, thats these good studies are going to be outweighed by more of the untoward effects of coffee. I’ve always felt that caffeine addiction – drinking more than 5 cups a day or more than 500 mg, contributed to a number of deaths associated with GI, cardiac, blood pressure problems, and stroke in the US. It comes down to – what are you at more risk for, heart disease, diabetes or Alzheimers, so whats better for you to take?
CNS: That leads to wanting more information on a person’s individual biology, and we’re getting closer to that with different ways of assessing the DNA, we’re able to access much more than the family history. Where do you see that leading, in terms of how people make the kind of decisions you are talking about.
DARRYL: Thats interesting because in medicine now, in pharmacy schools across the nation, in medical schools, they’re talking about genomics and genomic therapy. Today there is an easier method of looking at peoples genes, getting peoples vulnerabilities. Gene clips take a snapshot of somebody’s gene’s vulnerabilities, to determine what type of medication is best for somebody with hypertension, with diabetes, with asthma. This matches the medication with the persons vulnerability. If this continues to develop it will explodes into an era of medicine where everyone is treated not only by their diagnosis and symptom otology, but also by matching the treatment to their actual genetic code – what will be healthiest for them, and cause the least side effects. This could extend to nutrition, and maybe even determine whether you should drink coffee and tea or not.
CNS: An interesting reverse side of that – Salon magazine calls 2010 the year of the “anti-energy drink.” New products have been introduced that are like the opposite of Red Bull what do you know about that?
DARRYL: Its a historical thing; I see it purely in the form of history and the addiction cycle. Dr. Mustos book (The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Control) talks about a historical pattern in which theres an era, of upper abuse, then theres an era of downer abuse – and this sort of conforms to that. A methamphetamine addict can only stay up so long before they start to crash and have all the negative side effects – paranoia, irritability. If you ever stayed awake on caffeine, or on energy drinks, its not a real comfortable place to be, and you feel it. That leads to eras spanning 10-20 to 30 years where people are facilitated by the uppers – cocaine and meth, but leads them to a crash. So then they seek something to help them come down, to get some sleep, be more relaxed and rested.
Speedballs combine both uppers and downers. In the last 5-10 years we saw an explosion of Red Bull bars, where a shot of Jagermeister or whiskey is dumped inside an energy drink like Red Bull, Monster or Rock Star, and downed to get – in effect- a speedball. Research shows that taking an upper and a downer at the same time provides a person with one of the best feelings you can ever get from drugs … heroin and cocaine taken together, or meth with Vicodan, or Ecstasy with heroin. A small slice of people go from one to the other, and discover that the combination was the best of both worlds, only to discover that they have become addicted to both. The same energy drink companies are now coming out with these opposites. These are like an antihistamine drink, they contain some kind of valerian root, some kind of chamomile or some other natural herbs to help sedate a person or help them come off their energy rush. Theres one called Drank which was the street name for that old hip-hop drink that abused antihistamines called Purple Drank. So its apropos for this whole upper-downer cycle including the speedball cycle to be part of that. Now we are in transition – headed toward downers again. The street is fascinating – they figure out things way before pharmacologists or doctors or scientists.