The popular beverage linked with healthy aging
A 32-year study of nearly 50,000 women suggests that those who drank coffee in midlife were more likely to age healthily, maintaining sharpness, strength, and mental well-being.
The research, presented at the American Society for Nutrition's annual conference, found that caffeinated coffee, unlike tea or decaf, was 'linked with healthy aging'.
Healthy aging was defined as living to age 70 or older without major chronic diseases, maintaining physical function and good mental health, and exhibiting no cognitive impairment or memory complaints.
Women considered 'healthy agers' consumed an average of 315 mg of caffeine per day in mid-life, primarily from regular coffee, with each additional cup linked to a 2-5 per cent higher chance of healthy aging.
Dr Sara Mahdavi, who led the research, suggests that moderate coffee intake may offer protective benefits when combined with healthy lifestyle habits.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
16 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Breakthrough in search for HIV cure leaves researchers ‘overwhelmed'
A cure for HIV could be a step closer after researchers found a new way to force the virus out of hiding inside human cells. The virus's ability to conceal itself inside certain white blood cells has been one of the main challenges for scientists looking for a cure. It means there is a reservoir of the HIV in the body, capable of reactivation, that neither the immune system nor drugs can tackle. Now researchers from the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity in Melbourne, have demonstrated a way to make the virus visible, paving the way to fully clear it from the body. It is based on mRNA technology, which came to prominence during the Covid-19 pandemic when it was used in vaccines made by Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech. In a paper published in Nature Communications, the researchers have shown for the first time that mRNA can be delivered into the cells where HIV is hiding, by encasing it in a tiny, specially formulated fat bubble. The mRNA then instructs the cells to reveal the virus. Globally, there are almost 40 million people living with HIV, who must take medication for the rest of their lives in order to suppress the virus and ensure they do not develop symptoms or transmit it. For many it remains deadly, with UNAids figures suggesting one person died of HIV every minute in 2023. It was 'previously thought impossible' to deliver mRNA to the type of white blood cell that is home to HIV, said Dr Paula Cevaal, research fellow at the Doherty Institute and co-first author of the study, because those cells did not take up the fat bubbles, or lipid nanoparticles (LNPs), used to carry it. The team have developed a new type of LNP that those cells will accept, known as LNP X. She said: 'Our hope is that this new nanoparticle design could be a new pathway to an HIV cure.' When a colleague first presented test results at the lab's weekly meeting, Cevaal said, they seemed too good to be true. 'We sent her back into the lab to repeat it, and she came back the next week with results that were equally good. So we had to believe it. And of course, since then, we've repeated it many, many, many more times. 'We were overwhelmed by how [much of a] night and day difference it was – from not working before, and then all of a sudden it was working. And all of us were just sitting gasping like, 'wow'.' Further research will be needed to determine whether revealing the virus is enough to allow the body's immune system to deal with it, or whether the technology will need to be combined with other therapies to eliminate HIV from the body. The study is laboratory based and was carried out in cells donated by HIV patients. The path to using the technology as part of a cure for patients is long, and would require successful tests in animals followed by safety trials in humans, likely to take years, before efficacy trials could even begin. 'In the field of biomedicine, many things eventually don't make it into the clinic – that is the unfortunate truth; I don't want to paint a prettier picture than what is the reality,' stressed Cevaal. 'But in terms of specifically the field of HIV cure, we have never seen anything close to as good as what we are seeing, in terms of how well we are able to reveal this virus. 'So from that point of view, we're very hopeful that we are also able to see this type of response in an animal, and that we could eventually do this in humans.' Dr Michael Roche of the University of Melbourne and co-senior author of the research, said the discovery could have broader implications beyond HIV, with the relevant white blood cells also involved in other diseases including cancers. Dr Jonathan Stoye, a retrovirologist and emeritus scientist at the Francis Crick Institute, who was not involved in the study, said the approach taken by the Melbourne team appeared be a major advance on existing strategies to force the virus out of hiding, but further studies would be needed to determine how best to kill it after that. He added: 'Ultimately, one big unknown remains. Do you need to eliminate the entire reservoir for success or just the major part? If just 10% of the latent reservoir survives will that be sufficient to seed new infection? Only time will tell. 'However, that does not detract from the significance of the current study, which represents a major potential advance in delivery of mRNA for therapeutic purposes to blood cells.' Prof Tomáš Hanke of the Jenner Institute, University of Oxford, disputed the idea that getting RNA into white blood cells had been a significant challenge. He said the hope that all cells in the body where HIV was hiding could be reached in this way was 'merely a dream'.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
Into the photic zone: does a darkening ocean threaten marine life?
Vast areas of the ocean are getting darker, according to research based on satellite imaging. Marine ecosystems are governed by faint light changes – from mass nightly migrations to coral spawning cycles – so what happens when that light begins to fade? Ian Sample talks to Prof Tim Smyth from the Plymouth Marine Laboratory about why this darkening is happening and how life in the 'photic zone' – the sunlit upper layer that is home to 90% of marine organisms – could be profoundly affected
The Guardian
3 hours ago
- The Guardian
A cookbook taught me everything I know about home - and sobriety
If there was a single feeling that defined my 20s, it was a generalised allergy to the very concept of home: I learned it's a myth that you only run away from it once. If you have the skills, you can spend a lot of your life dodging comfort, security and a place to return to. Which I did because I was an alcoholic, and alcoholics are always suspicious of safety. The only true way to be safe is to not drink, after all, and you do not want to stop drinking above all else. This in turn informed my relationship to food. It goes that way for all of us: food is home. You're not really staying in a place unless you've cooked in it. Otherwise you're just a visitor. And because I had always wanted to be a visitor, I'd long been almost deliberately malnourished. I often boasted about my profoundly undistinguished palate, because everybody wants to ensure the worst decisions they make sound like some sort of quirky character trait. But then an odd thing happened: I quit drinking. I tried a few times, sometimes making it stick for a few months, once for over a year. And then finally, definitively, I just … stopped. I don't want to make it sound easy. I mean more that after years of trying to find sobriety, it seemed like suddenly sobriety found me. After that, on the odd day when I caught a glance of myself in the mirror, it seemed like the person there might be someone I might quite like, someday. It was around this time that I purchased an unusual gift for myself: a cookbook. The author was Nigel Slater, whose name rang a bell. Picking it up satisfied one of those odd urges that I had in the early days of a true commitment to sobriety. I later came to understand these urges were newfound pangs of self-preservation. I was immediately taken by the way Slater wrote about food. These were not just recipes. They were short poems, filled with astonishingly beautiful, compact phrases: at one point in Notes from the Larder, he describes garlic being as 'fresh and sweet as a baby's breath'. This poetry was what kept me going through a number of culinary disasters – I learned that before one makes something as wholly nourishing as Slater's macaroni and tomato pasta, they have to actually learn to cook pasta. But I got better – better in regards to cooking, and to all the other stuff too. I started to cook almost every meal, a profound change to a lifetime of takeaway. I made sweet teas and fish cakes; ricotta pancakes and pink lemonades. All of a sudden, I found I had a new sentence to describe myself. I'd had a few in my back pocket for a long time, all of them either tied to my profession or my addictions: I am an alcoholic, I am a writer, I am a painter, I am a chain smoker. But now I had one which was tied to neither self-destruction nor my career: I like to cook. And then something else miraculous happened: I met my partner, Rosie. I sometimes say that she taught me everything I know to be good in this world, and I mean it. The world makes sense to me now, because she is in it. Rosie likes to cook too. For many of our early days together, I was her sous-chef, chopping beside her in the kitchen, with a record on, astonished by this feeling that had come over me, which was the feeling of happiness. These days, I do as much of the cooking in our home as I can without denying Rosie her own culinary joy. I cook for Rosie; I cook for our housemate; I cook for my friends. Because I'm a writer, I often work from home, and one of my favourite things is making something that will be ready shortly after Rosie returns from work. It feels like a little gateway into the rest of the evening; a little marker that says, we are here together again and I have something for us to eat. Destruction is sudden. Healing is slow. You don't actually need to make that many decisions to ruin your life, but you have to make a great deal of decisions to improve it. If you're an addict, you need to stay sober every single day. It is work that never ends. What also never ends, but is only ever briefly satisfied: the desire to eat. When I return, almost daily, to Slater's cookbook, I am re-pledging the desire to not die; to simply, uncomplicatedly sustain myself. The other day I cooked a pasta bake. It was mostly done by the time I heard Rosie's key in the door, the smells of cheese, salt and herbs wafting through the kitchen. And when I heard it, I thought, with a thrill: oh, she's home. And I remembered again, properly, that I was too. Joseph Earp is a critic, painter and novelist. His latest book is Painting Portraits of Everyone I've Ever Dated (A$34.99, Hardie Grant)
