As always, it's hard to piece out links from correlative data. A very possible linkage in this case could be that the people drinking coffee or other caffeinated drinks in the study had more shit...
As always, it's hard to piece out links from correlative data. A very possible linkage in this case could be that the people drinking coffee or other caffeinated drinks in the study had more shit to do - that's part of why people drink coffee, after all. Only a small niche are James Hoffman levels of coffee afficionados.
If you're sleeping in every day in your retirement, you don't really need coffee.
So the causative link could be in mental activity, something else that in correlative studies is shown to correlate with lower dementia risk.
I am so fucking sick of articles like this. You know who drinks a lot of coffee? Rich people and white people. This JAMA study was specifically looking at healthcare professionals, a group which...
I am so fucking sick of articles like this. You know who drinks a lot of coffee? Rich people and white people. This JAMA study was specifically looking at healthcare professionals, a group which is famously segregated by class, race, and income. I'm not about to pay for access to that article, but they didn't mention controlling for any of that in the abstract or the news blurb. Articles like this one bring to mind a passage from The Doctor's Dilemma by George Bernard Shaw:
Thus it is easy to prove that the wearing of tall hats and the carrying of umbrellas enlarges the chest, prolongs life, and confers comparative immunity from disease; for the statistics show that the classes which use these articles are bigger, healthier, and live longer than the class which never dreams of possessing such things. It does not take much perspicacity to see that what really makes this difference is not the tall hat and the umbrella, but the wealth and nourishment of which they are evidence, and that a gold watch or membership of a club in Pall Mall might be proved in the same way to have the like sovereign virtues. A university degree, a daily bath, the owning of thirty pairs of trousers, a knowledge of Wagner's music, a pew in church, anything, in short, that implies more means and better nurture than the mass of laborers enjoy, can be statistically palmed off as a magic-spell conferring all sorts of privileges.
To be fair, controlling for race and income level would absolutely be something you'd expect them to do as standard and would not be notable enough to be mentioned in the abstract (much less in...
To be fair, controlling for race and income level would absolutely be something you'd expect them to do as standard and would not be notable enough to be mentioned in the abstract (much less in press about the article). I'm not paying for access either, so I can't vouch for the fact that they did do it, but the fact that it's not in the abstract or press doesn't serve as good evidence that they didn't control for those factors. These factors would be extremely obvious to control for in a study like this imo and I would judge the authors very strongly if they didn't even attempt to control for them here, but I don't think it's strange at all to leave those details out of the abstract.
For the record, I agree that studies like this in general are pretty limited and things like race and wealth can still be confounding factors even when attempts are made to control for them, so that doesn't necessarily contradict your overall conclusion. I just don't think it's charitable to assume the authors neglected such painfully obvious confounding factors without knowing more.
I pulled up the study, and the listed control variables are: Age Marital Status Neighborhood socioeconomic status index Education Level Spouse's Education Level Profession Current Smoker Duration...
I pulled up the study, and the listed control variables are:
No problem, gotta use my academic access while I still have it :p If anyone else is curious about any part of this paper, let me know and I'll look into it. The recency of this paper means that it...
Exemplary
No problem, gotta use my academic access while I still have it :p
If anyone else is curious about any part of this paper, let me know and I'll look into it. The recency of this paper means that it will unfortunately not be available on open-access programs like Sci-Hub or Anna's Archive for a while.
For those curious about why these are the controls chosen, such as why 'Neighborhood socioeconomic status index' is used instead of more direct metrics such as race or income (which would help more directly address methodology concerns like @alden's), it seems that the authors are pulling their data from two surveys. As such, they probably didn't get to choose which questions were asked in those surveys. Since all of the participants are doctors, dentists, nurses, vets, etc., those factors may have also been viewed as less relevant to the study since the effects are measured within one population; that is to say, measuring the outcomes of coffee-drinking doctors vs. non-coffee drinking doctors. It's also possible that the authors just felt that the socioeconomic index was good enough to account for race/income. Unfortunately, the controls don't get too much focus in the methods section of the paper, so if you're curious I would email the authors.
Update:
I did some digging on the Neighborhood Socioeconomic Status Index (nSES). The nSES is comprised of two main categories of factors: neighborhood affluence and neighborhood disadvantage. All versions of the nSES include income in some form, with the exact values adjusted over time. Past versions of the nSES index have included proportion of people identifying as Non-Hispanic Black in the neighborhood disadvantage category. It is worth noting that the most recent iteration of the nSES does not. The reasoning for this according to the project:
Neighborhood Disadvantage has evolved considerably since 2000. In previous decades, disadvantage was measured by a concentration of unemployed residents, female headed families, and people identifying as Non-Hispanic Black race (in addition to measures of poverty). However, these characteristics have had progressively weaker associations with neighborhood disadvantage over time. This evolution suggests that the key drivers of neighborhood disadvantage are now exclusively economical rather than related to markers of social position. As such, the makeup of our neighborhood disadvantage measure has changed.
Our 2016-2020 dataset has been updated to reflect the concentrated economic disadvantage represented by a high proportion of people living in poverty, receiving public assistance income, and with low family incomes (<$40,000).
Anyone else get the feeling they’re trying to encourage people to drink more coffee because it/everything just got really expensive a couple years ago so a lot of people dropped it since its non...
Anyone else get the feeling they’re trying to encourage people to drink more coffee because it/everything just got really expensive a couple years ago so a lot of people dropped it since its non essential?
Nah, this just feels like one of any number of studies that tells you X food is killing/healing you. Even if the coffee industry's involved in funding it'd be independent of the recent cost...
Nah, this just feels like one of any number of studies that tells you X food is killing/healing you. Even if the coffee industry's involved in funding it'd be independent of the recent cost increases.
I haven't. In fact, I am deeper into coffee now than ever before. I agree that I see no reason to think the study is just trying to get people to buy coffee. There's no sign of heavy industry...
I haven't. In fact, I am deeper into coffee now than ever before. I agree that I see no reason to think the study is just trying to get people to buy coffee. There's no sign of heavy industry involvement in this study. The authors don't seem to have a conflict of interest. I don't know who funded it, to be fair, but I don't always think that industry funding leads to forced outcomes.
I was already getting used to higher prices because of buying specialty coffee that treats producers/farms well and as I have been pressed on budget heavily, I have given up many other things first. Coffee is one of a few small joys that I refuse to let go of among the horrors.
Edit: related video: The Coffee Commodity Market Explained in 12 Minutes
The commodity market price of coffee certainly is way higher than it has been historically, but that commodity price has always been too low. That doesn't mean that it going up translates to treating producers better but its historically wildly low price is indicative of a long history of underpricing coffee across the board in a way that makes it competitively priced at home but exploitatively priced at origin. It does fluctuate and has been coming down from peak a bit after some tariff things were settled and so on.
The real truth is most grocery store coffee is still relatively VERY inexpensive, and a majority of the mass-produced stuff is still exploitatively low cost when it comes to paying producers properly regardless of it having to become more expensive because the underlying costs are higher due to commodity price changes, transportation prices, tariffs, the real threat of climate change to coffee, etc.
All about perspective. When I am used to spending $18-$28 on a bag of specialty my perspective has adjusted to actually be a bit suspicious of anything that costs $8-$12 for my personal values but all of that to say there's plenty of inexpensive coffee still on the market for anyone that wants it. Dunkin, 8 O' Clock, etc are still very affordable. Local roasters with grocery distributions are often only slightly above those costs.
Especially when people spend $4 for a coffee drink at Starbucks- one realizes that $4 of coffee beans can go much much further than that. Even at my specialty buying level I am paying $0.80-$1.50 per day of coffee, and a lot of non-specialty options are half that cost. Fair point that I drink less than a lot of people though (I am not making big pots of coffee)
I don't deny though that with peoples' budgets squeezed and especially for those struggling that some have probably given up coffee, because for them even a small uptick in price has a huge impact. I want to remain mindful of my privilege.
I just don't think that given the overall picture it makes much sense to assume a study like this is surreptitiously trying to get people to buy more coffee. This DOESN'T mean I think the study means much overall either. I am not defending its conclusions or methodology just not convinced of malintent
Dang this got long-winded and so on. I got rambling off on some tangent. Sorry :/
Yeah, I do splurge sometimes on coffee at home though I don't have a clue what I'm doing (and I'll be throwing a bunch of creamer in anyway) but I try to buy fair trade and such, I just do it with...
Yeah, I do splurge sometimes on coffee at home though I don't have a clue what I'm doing (and I'll be throwing a bunch of creamer in anyway) but I try to buy fair trade and such, I just do it with the stuff on clearance or at TJ Maxx or similar, or have found some vendors at farmers markets or small businesses on Tiktok. (Farmers market guy will make "tea bags" of the coffee for cold brew for me).
But I don't remember to do the cold brew very often and I'm sure my beans are old and sad and I'm putting flavored creamer in there anyway so it'll be fine.
Sample size of 1, but I did mostly dropped coffee because the prices got kinda stupid. Granted I was already kind of bouncing between tea and coffee, so it wasn't a hard decision. I just can't...
Sample size of 1, but I did mostly dropped coffee because the prices got kinda stupid. Granted I was already kind of bouncing between tea and coffee, so it wasn't a hard decision. I just can't stand the flavor of the cheap stuff (which got less cheap!) and the mid-range stuff I usually drink got more expensive than it was worth.
Sure, I just didn't have a sense of scale right? Have most folks switched to home brewing, or cut in other areas? I don't order coffee out much, I tend towards a diet soda for my caffeine, but I...
Sure, I just didn't have a sense of scale right? Have most folks switched to home brewing, or cut in other areas? I don't order coffee out much, I tend towards a diet soda for my caffeine, but I do make cold brew irregularly, and I guess I've cut back on my ordering out but it was not due to coffee prices increasing just generally eating out less.
Hence wondering if folks in general have cut back (and if it's due to coffee prices increasing)
I mean, yes people won't literally die without coffee (though they may figuratively die), but...There's definitely other stuff I'd cut first before I start cutting coffee. And have; eating out...
its non essential
I mean, yes people won't literally die without coffee (though they may figuratively die), but...There's definitely other stuff I'd cut first before I start cutting coffee. And have; eating out less, buying less junk food, etc.. I know coffee is getting expensive, but I also know a lot of people "need" coffee. Even as a nice little treat, coffee is pretty inexpensive. A bag of some local beans from the grocery store is like ~$15. That's 50% more than it used to be 2-3 years ago, but that'll last me a month. $0.50 a day for 2-4 cups of drip brewed.
I guess the question is: are people cutting coffee? Are people buying less due to price increases?
I’ll stick to my zero sugar soda and zero calorie sweetened hot teas, thanks. When I drink coffee, I drink it for the flavor. In fact, I literally only drink decaf coffee because the jitters (the...
I’ll stick to my zero sugar soda and zero calorie sweetened hot teas, thanks. When I drink coffee, I drink it for the flavor.
In fact, I literally only drink decaf coffee because the jitters (the most important deciding factor) and crash (seems less common with zero sugar sweeteners) aren’t worth it.
I’m not really sure I see the connection. Coffee not only has no calories but is going to be healthier than artificially sweetened soda just by base material.
I’ll stick to my zero sugar soda and zero calorie sweetened hot teas, thanks.
I’m not really sure I see the connection. Coffee not only has no calories but is going to be healthier than artificially sweetened soda just by base material.
Coffee is only palatable to me if I augment it. I remove all health benefits by doing so. So for me, personally, I’ll pass on the coffee and its benefits because I can’t consume it raw. Or...
Coffee is only palatable to me if I augment it. I remove all health benefits by doing so. So for me, personally, I’ll pass on the coffee and its benefits because I can’t consume it raw. Or unmodified, I guess.
As always, it's hard to piece out links from correlative data. A very possible linkage in this case could be that the people drinking coffee or other caffeinated drinks in the study had more shit to do - that's part of why people drink coffee, after all. Only a small niche are James Hoffman levels of coffee afficionados.
If you're sleeping in every day in your retirement, you don't really need coffee.
So the causative link could be in mental activity, something else that in correlative studies is shown to correlate with lower dementia risk.
I am so fucking sick of articles like this. You know who drinks a lot of coffee? Rich people and white people. This JAMA study was specifically looking at healthcare professionals, a group which is famously segregated by class, race, and income. I'm not about to pay for access to that article, but they didn't mention controlling for any of that in the abstract or the news blurb. Articles like this one bring to mind a passage from The Doctor's Dilemma by George Bernard Shaw:
To be fair, controlling for race and income level would absolutely be something you'd expect them to do as standard and would not be notable enough to be mentioned in the abstract (much less in press about the article). I'm not paying for access either, so I can't vouch for the fact that they did do it, but the fact that it's not in the abstract or press doesn't serve as good evidence that they didn't control for those factors. These factors would be extremely obvious to control for in a study like this imo and I would judge the authors very strongly if they didn't even attempt to control for them here, but I don't think it's strange at all to leave those details out of the abstract.
For the record, I agree that studies like this in general are pretty limited and things like race and wealth can still be confounding factors even when attempts are made to control for them, so that doesn't necessarily contradict your overall conclusion. I just don't think it's charitable to assume the authors neglected such painfully obvious confounding factors without knowing more.
I pulled up the study, and the listed control variables are:
Edit: Missed a few:
Bless, thank you for accessing the paywalled stuff! I wouldn't have even thought to include stuff like red meat consumption, wow.
No problem, gotta use my academic access while I still have it :p
If anyone else is curious about any part of this paper, let me know and I'll look into it. The recency of this paper means that it will unfortunately not be available on open-access programs like Sci-Hub or Anna's Archive for a while.
For those curious about why these are the controls chosen, such as why 'Neighborhood socioeconomic status index' is used instead of more direct metrics such as race or income (which would help more directly address methodology concerns like @alden's), it seems that the authors are pulling their data from two surveys. As such, they probably didn't get to choose which questions were asked in those surveys. Since all of the participants are doctors, dentists, nurses, vets, etc., those factors may have also been viewed as less relevant to the study since the effects are measured within one population; that is to say, measuring the outcomes of coffee-drinking doctors vs. non-coffee drinking doctors. It's also possible that the authors just felt that the socioeconomic index was good enough to account for race/income. Unfortunately, the controls don't get too much focus in the methods section of the paper, so if you're curious I would email the authors.
Update:
I did some digging on the Neighborhood Socioeconomic Status Index (nSES). The nSES is comprised of two main categories of factors: neighborhood affluence and neighborhood disadvantage. All versions of the nSES include income in some form, with the exact values adjusted over time. Past versions of the nSES index have included proportion of people identifying as Non-Hispanic Black in the neighborhood disadvantage category. It is worth noting that the most recent iteration of the nSES does not. The reasoning for this according to the project:
(Via the NaNDA website @ UMichigan)
Nice, gonna ride the confirmation bias and pat myself on the back for staving off dementia with my addiction
Same. Now if I could only remember how much coffee I drank today...
If you can't remember, you probably need a cup of coffee.
Better make it two, just to be sure.
Data suggests upwards of three cups… better make it four to be safe.
Hell yeah. I drink on average about 20oz of coffee a day, sometimes up to 30. I'm gonna be juuuuust five...
I also usually drink about 6dl, I thought I would be six... I guess I will be just five as well
Anyone else get the feeling they’re trying to encourage people to drink more coffee because it/everything just got really expensive a couple years ago so a lot of people dropped it since its non essential?
Nah, this just feels like one of any number of studies that tells you X food is killing/healing you. Even if the coffee industry's involved in funding it'd be independent of the recent cost increases.
(Have a lot of people dropped coffee?)
I doubt it. Seems more likely that folks would switch to making it at home or buying it at a more adorable place.
Your autocorrect made me smile this morning. : )
I haven't. In fact, I am deeper into coffee now than ever before. I agree that I see no reason to think the study is just trying to get people to buy coffee. There's no sign of heavy industry involvement in this study. The authors don't seem to have a conflict of interest. I don't know who funded it, to be fair, but I don't always think that industry funding leads to forced outcomes.
I was already getting used to higher prices because of buying specialty coffee that treats producers/farms well and as I have been pressed on budget heavily, I have given up many other things first. Coffee is one of a few small joys that I refuse to let go of among the horrors.
Edit: related video: The Coffee Commodity Market Explained in 12 Minutes
The commodity market price of coffee certainly is way higher than it has been historically, but that commodity price has always been too low. That doesn't mean that it going up translates to treating producers better but its historically wildly low price is indicative of a long history of underpricing coffee across the board in a way that makes it competitively priced at home but exploitatively priced at origin. It does fluctuate and has been coming down from peak a bit after some tariff things were settled and so on.
The real truth is most grocery store coffee is still relatively VERY inexpensive, and a majority of the mass-produced stuff is still exploitatively low cost when it comes to paying producers properly regardless of it having to become more expensive because the underlying costs are higher due to commodity price changes, transportation prices, tariffs, the real threat of climate change to coffee, etc.
All about perspective. When I am used to spending $18-$28 on a bag of specialty my perspective has adjusted to actually be a bit suspicious of anything that costs $8-$12 for my personal values but all of that to say there's plenty of inexpensive coffee still on the market for anyone that wants it. Dunkin, 8 O' Clock, etc are still very affordable. Local roasters with grocery distributions are often only slightly above those costs.
Especially when people spend $4 for a coffee drink at Starbucks- one realizes that $4 of coffee beans can go much much further than that. Even at my specialty buying level I am paying $0.80-$1.50 per day of coffee, and a lot of non-specialty options are half that cost. Fair point that I drink less than a lot of people though (I am not making big pots of coffee)
I don't deny though that with peoples' budgets squeezed and especially for those struggling that some have probably given up coffee, because for them even a small uptick in price has a huge impact. I want to remain mindful of my privilege.
I just don't think that given the overall picture it makes much sense to assume a study like this is surreptitiously trying to get people to buy more coffee. This DOESN'T mean I think the study means much overall either. I am not defending its conclusions or methodology just not convinced of malintent
Dang this got long-winded and so on. I got rambling off on some tangent. Sorry :/
Yeah, I do splurge sometimes on coffee at home though I don't have a clue what I'm doing (and I'll be throwing a bunch of creamer in anyway) but I try to buy fair trade and such, I just do it with the stuff on clearance or at TJ Maxx or similar, or have found some vendors at farmers markets or small businesses on Tiktok. (Farmers market guy will make "tea bags" of the coffee for cold brew for me).
But I don't remember to do the cold brew very often and I'm sure my beans are old and sad and I'm putting flavored creamer in there anyway so it'll be fine.
Sample size of 1, but I did mostly dropped coffee because the prices got kinda stupid. Granted I was already kind of bouncing between tea and coffee, so it wasn't a hard decision. I just can't stand the flavor of the cheap stuff (which got less cheap!) and the mid-range stuff I usually drink got more expensive than it was worth.
Sure, I just didn't have a sense of scale right? Have most folks switched to home brewing, or cut in other areas? I don't order coffee out much, I tend towards a diet soda for my caffeine, but I do make cold brew irregularly, and I guess I've cut back on my ordering out but it was not due to coffee prices increasing just generally eating out less.
Hence wondering if folks in general have cut back (and if it's due to coffee prices increasing)
I mean, yes people won't literally die without coffee (though they may figuratively die), but...There's definitely other stuff I'd cut first before I start cutting coffee. And have; eating out less, buying less junk food, etc.. I know coffee is getting expensive, but I also know a lot of people "need" coffee. Even as a nice little treat, coffee is pretty inexpensive. A bag of some local beans from the grocery store is like ~$15. That's 50% more than it used to be 2-3 years ago, but that'll last me a month. $0.50 a day for 2-4 cups of drip brewed.
I guess the question is: are people cutting coffee? Are people buying less due to price increases?
Well, no. There's no "they" who would have a monied interest in coffee sales. Harvard/Mass Gen Brigham certainly wouldn't.
I’ll stick to my zero sugar soda and zero calorie sweetened hot teas, thanks. When I drink coffee, I drink it for the flavor.
In fact, I literally only drink decaf coffee because the jitters (the most important deciding factor) and crash (seems less common with zero sugar sweeteners) aren’t worth it.
I’m not really sure I see the connection. Coffee not only has no calories but is going to be healthier than artificially sweetened soda just by base material.
Coffee is only palatable to me if I augment it. I remove all health benefits by doing so. So for me, personally, I’ll pass on the coffee and its benefits because I can’t consume it raw. Or unmodified, I guess.
I’m going to be cognitively sound until I’m over 200 years old. Great news!