In recent years, especially in developed countries, rates of depression have been trending upwards. It doesn’t help that young adults are living through one catastrophe after another. While environment does contribute to risks of depression, depression is a very complicated mental illness that has widely varying risks between individuals and cultures. Coffee may help reduce these numbers.

Healing

Research conducted in 2016 published in the Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry show that caffeine consumption contributed to a significant decrease in a person’s risk of developing depression. Consumption of caffeinated coffee had a protective effect against the disease and even countered the effects of it as well. The study also included using caffeinated tea which provided the same results but was less effective than coffee. Drinking the equivalent of about four cups of coffee’s worth of caffeine drastically reduced suicidal ideation in women but not men.

Reality

Coffee contains chlorogenic acid, ferulic acid, and caffeic acid. These acids have been shown to reduce inflammation of nerve cells of individuals with depression which can alleviate certain symptoms. While caffeine can reduce or even prevent symptoms of the disease and the disease itself, it’s important to remember that depression is an extremely complicated mental illness that requires targeted therapies and medications to fully solve.

Learn more about mental illness and how coffee affects it in this blog here!

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By John Toledo

The post Coffee & Depression appeared first on The Coffee Class.

If you are an avid coffee enjoyer, you are most certainly familiar with the phrase, “how do you like your coffee, black or with cream?” Of course, there are plenty of variations of this phrase, but the gist of it is whether or not you like your coffee bitter or with a little bit of sweetness. As it turns out, researchers from Northwestern discovered that your answer may be influenced by your genes!

One Lump or None?

Coffee consumers that particularly enjoy their coffee black also enjoy dark chocolate and the researchers may know why. They discovered that coffee drinkers that prefer their coffee black also metabolized caffeine much faster than their counterparts that enjoyed their coffee with cream and their chocolate with milk. This connection prompted researchers to look at a key genome that may be responsible for this odd quirk.

Bittersweet

One reason they believe dark coffee enjoyers prefer dark coffee is that they subconsciously associate the bitter taste of the caffeine in coffee and in chocolate with more energy, which does have truth to it. This is interesting as it shows that the taste doesn’t make dark coffee enjoyers flock in droves to their bitter drinks, but the idea of dark coffee is more beneficial to their energy levels makes them consider drinking dark roasts of coffee more often. If you’d like to know why darker roasts of coffee provide more energy, check out our other blog on this topic here!

Next time you wonder why your coworker loves their taste of bitter in the morning, just know they probably can’t help it!

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By John Toledo

The post I Like Your Genes appeared first on The Coffee Class.