The study looks pretty decent, as far as large epi studies go. I don't see the point, frankly - there have been dozens of almost identical studies with the same conclusions - but it's a good piece of researchpic.twitter.com/9Moqe1NzLv
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The study looks pretty decent, as far as large epi studies go. I don't see the point, frankly - there have been dozens of almost identical studies with the same conclusions - but it's a good piece of researchpic.twitter.com/9Moqe1NzLv
Basically, the researchers looked at a massive (n=500,000) sample of people and compared their health on a variety of measures with their consumption of caffeine
If you had to guess, what is the biggest problem here?
If you answered "It's an observational study, genius", you did better than 99/100 journos, apparently Good job
It was an observational study that really just looked at correlation between coffee and ill health. They controlled for some things, but honestly not all that much
For example, their only measure of SES was education, which as we all know is pretty problematicpic.twitter.com/fmhm8ZHQS6
Maybe people who drink coffee are different to people who don't. Maybe they are also healthier in other ways not captured by this study It's very likely, especially given previous research
Another point: while there was a decrease in all-cause mortality in the coffee-drinkers, there were no decreases in rates of : Lung cancer Bronchial cancer Colorectal cancer Breast cancer Pancreatic cancer Ischemic heart disease Stroke Cardiovascular disease Respiratory disease
The ABSOLUTE decrease in risk (as opposed to the relative decrease) was also tiny, maxing out at ~0.3% for 10-year all-cause mortality
In other words, drinking coffee for a decade reduced your risk of dying by less than half of a percent point, even if we take that result at face value
But to me, one of the BIG smoking guns here...prior to adjusting for things like sex and BMI, the results were REALLY significant After adjusting? Only just barely
This almost certainly means that, if you were to include more factors, you'd see the results trend to no statistical significance
Which brings us neatly to the point of the study It wasn't to prove that coffee was GOOD for you It was to show that people with genetic variants that make caffeine metabolism problematic can drink coffee safely
All they wanted to show was that coffee is probably not too bad for you, and that most people can drink it fine Which they did ANYTHING MORE IS TOTAL NONSENSE
Coffee is a fucking brilliant invention. But drinking it to make yourself healthier or to "Save your life" is bullshit that you should be wary of
If you enjoyed this thread, it is now expanded on in blog form here:https://medium.com/@gidmk/6-coffees-a-day-wont-save-your-life-9c81ba56d1e5 …
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