Here are more fascinating facts about caffeine and cancer.
Caffeine affects the immune system via at least two opposing mechanisms.
Mechanism 1: A2A receptor antagonism (immunostimulatory)
Tumors and damaged tissues release adenosine, which engages the A2A receptor on immune cells and signals them to stand down. Caffeine antagonizes (i.e., blocks) this receptor.
Mechanism 2: Raising intracellular cAMP (immunosuppressive)
Caffeine also inhibits phosphodiesterase, the enzyme that hydrolyzes (i.e., breaks down) cAMP. cAMP accumulates inside immune cells, which acts as a "calm down" signal.
Note: both mechanisms are dose-dependent. At dietary caffeine levels, A2A antagonism likely dominates, whereas PDE inhibition is weak and mainly relevant at higher concentrations. However, the net immune effect in the tumor microenvironment remains unproven.
---
If you would like to learn more, I can outline a framework for technical folks to ease in and become more informed on cancer. Gaps abound. The more people who understand cancer, the faster we get to cures. Moreover, personalized cancer treatment is the obvious future. Knowledge acquired now may pay off later (but hopefully not needed).
On second thought, I will publish something regardless of interest.
It will be an "Cancer for Engineers" framework, delivered via free, open-source Custom GPTs and Claude Skills. (Gemini gems are less reliable in our experience.)
The goal: to ease engineers into cancer via AI personalized introductory curriculums with varying time commitments to enable deeper independent investigation or fast exits if interest wanes: 4 hours, 8 hours, 12 hours.
Basically 1-3 hours per week for a month.
The reason I think some engineers may find cancer interesting, aside from the societal impact:
The human body is like a complex operating system. Cancer is a severe runtime error. Tracing root causes -- like genetic mutations, signaling errors, or immune evasion -- has many parallels to diagnosing system failures.
BTW if anyone from Kaggle/GDM is reading this, we are having issues submitting a benchmark paper for NeurIPS based on the Kaggle Benchmark.
Google models seem to get a different scheduling priority, ironically, enough and take >20 hours to complete a benchmark task that other models like Opus 4.6 finish in <1 hour -- same code path, same task. Would love help if possible since the abstract deadline is Monday (It's last minute because we didn't originally plan to submit this, but someone suggested it.)
Yes, I know the four main methods of decaffeination. The haters have gone down this road with me many times. Why can't people just let me drink my decaf? It's like they can't enjoy their caffeine unless everybody does. It's weirdly pushy.
I don't think GP was criticizing you for liking decaf. Just pointing out that the decaf process may have affects on the beneficial compounds that aren't caffeine.
My initial charitable reading -- as someone who sometimes dabbles in decaf -- is that decaffeination has the bad side effect of stripping flavors, and likely many of the other biologically active chemicals. I can see from their further posts that they were more interested in unscientific fear mongering instead.
That said, I do think there is some truth that decaf is lacking (including via supercritical CO2) and I wonder how long until we could have a product like genetically engineered coffee plants that produce everything except caffeine. I'd like that, though I can immediately see an issue with growing a plant without its natural pesticide.
By "All you haters that give me grief for drinking my daily cup of decaf can shut up now", you are implying that decaf has the same health benefits of real coffee. That's not proven. And if you weren't meaning to imply that, there was no point to that reply.
I love coffee. It's good for you, it smells and tastes so good. It wakes you up, and prevents sleepiness after meals. Its stimulant nature is a plus, but not necessarily the main thing.
Unfortunately the most flavorful methods (espresso, french press, moka) also raise your cholesterol. So sadly, no, coffee is not universally "good for you". Filtered coffee methods are though, as the filter absorbs the oils.
Always so cute how fellow coffee lovers will loudly boast the health benefits of coffee, but when you add an asterisk they will see it as a personal attack and respond strongly :)
Coffee is not what defines your identity. It's fine to admit it isn't perfect.
My point is not that unfiltered coffee is good, I’m just saying that northern italians who eat dessert for breakfast, cook everything in lard, drink unfiltered coffee and even (gasp) sometimes smoke cigarettes are significantly healthier than Americans on every metric.
Not saying those things are necessarily good for you, I’m just saying we don’t seem to understand this stuff very well
Probably because they don't consume gobs of HFCS and ultra-processed foods, don't take the car for every single thing[0], and have obesity/overweight rates that are 20-40% lower. A healthier work-life balance and concomitant lower cortisol and blood pressure also helps a lot.
If you compare Italians and Greeks to, say, Swedes and Dutchies, you'd get a much different picture.
[0] not entirely Americans their personal fault, their urban design isn't for walking around
If something has several clear positive effects, and a possible small, arguably irrelevant, negative effect, most people will agree that yes, it's good for you.
It's like trying to argue that running may have a negative effect on some people's meniscus under some specific circumstances. That doesn't negate the generalization "running is good for you".
Sorry brother but the worry around cholesterol - especially in the context of the US - is not stemming from people drinking too much coffee. If you have high cholesterol there are 15 other things you should probably be cutting down on. This is similar to people who tell people to watch the sugar content in their fruit intake. No ones getting obese off fruit, the benefits outweigh the negatives tenfold.
I would be very cautious about any conclusions regarding its health benefits or detriments. Nutrition research is notoriously difficult to replicate or show causal links in humans engaging with the real world.
Texas A&M also has a coffee research center dedicated to promoting and protecting global coffee trade and consumption so… yeah.
FYI since many people don't know: Decaf isn't zero, it can still be several percentage points. In the US decaf is supposed to be under 3% of regular coffee but it's not commonly tested or enforced, so many types of decaf can be quite a bit higher. Several big cups of decaf can approach the caffeine content of one regular cup.
> Several big cups of decaf can approach the caffeine content of one regular cup
Do you have a source for this? Because it doesn't sound right to me. And also, I live in a coffee producing company, work adjacent to the coffee industry, and had a long conversation with someone planning to set up a business exporting green beans to the US, and their beans were getting tested to an extreme degree and being rejected for a few ppm over on certain things.
I have heard the 3% rule but fyi it's 1% in the EU and since there's actually not that many large scale decaffeination factories in the world, as far as I know they all target the EU level.
If you buy small batch, large batch, or somewhere in between it's probably been processed in one of these few large factories.
I am definitely going to do this as I age, I just don't need the stimulant effects as much anymore. That said, the ritual of getting coffee and sipping on something warm in the morning is really important to starting my day right.
Sadly, I can't. I tried all the decaf beans in my area and even some fancy online roastery specialized only in decaf beans, and they all tasted like ass, compared to their caffeinated cousins. So much money wasted trying to find good tasting decaf beans.
Not sure what the decaffeination process does, but it definitely does not preserve the taste of the "untouched" beans. Are my tastebuds too sensitive?
I love coffee, so this is a nice read. Couple years ago I switched to french press, fresh beans (grind on demand) & no milk or sugar - okay, a dash of full cream milk sometimes. Has to be strong - you can't drink weak coffee like that!
Not everything is dopamine. Maybe nitpicky on my end but it gets tiresome when everyone is just like dopamine this, dopamine that, when no one really understands neurotransmitters.
Haha, I viewed a video recently (in French) that said « dopamine is right-wing ».
It was ironic but interesting : dopamine is viewed as THE neurotransmitter of motivation while in fact it’s only one part of the mechanism. But it’s the part everyone is bragging about because it supports the idea that you can control your dopamine levels and be responsible of your own motivation.
The whole point of the argument was that your serotonin and noradrenaline levels were as much as important if not more, and, fat chance, you cannot buy serotonin or noradrenaline supplements. You have to be in mentally in a good place to get those right and that’s not something you have that much control over. Especially your noradrenaline levels are strongly tied to the quality of your environment and that’s why you should politically fight for a better life environment.
Not exactly, the article says that the effects aren't linked to caffeine, not that decaf has been shown to have the positive effects or still contain the necessary chemicals.
I was never a coffee drinker, but I became interested because what was said in Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s newsletter. ( There is a ton of medical research covered in there. )
I didn’t dig in too deeply, but started drinking a morning cup of sugar free double mocha cappuccino, to help my workouts.
If I’m fooling myself, don’t tell me. I like the cappuccino.
I did use pure nicotine and it was very bad for my health, probably due to high dosage, but still.
I've used heavy stimulants, benzos, opioids, dissociatives without an issue, but nicotine is in a class of its own in terms of how insidiously addictive it is.
But just from a health point of view: extreme arm and hand joint issues, forearm vascular issues that made my hands numb at night, palpitations/arrithmia like I was about to die when I used nicotine before sleep and I was drifting to sleep -- it really felt like I was about to die, like my heart was mangled up.
A lot of people consume nicotine. It has been isolated and used in products for a long time. There's no clear link to cancer, but it could impact cardiovascular health (like all stimulants seem to).
Some research indicates that nicotine can influence how existing cancer behaves and spreads, so that's worth considering.
He was suggesting— jokingly— that maybe coffee cancels out the deleterious effects of smoking, because indeed coffee + a cigar or pipe is truly an excellent experience.
I quit smoking a long time ago but if there's one thing I'm missing / craving is a hot cup of coffee with two cigarettes on an empty stomach during cold winter mornings... Fuuuuck.
Here are more fascinating facts about caffeine and cancer.
Caffeine affects the immune system via at least two opposing mechanisms.
Mechanism 1: A2A receptor antagonism (immunostimulatory) Tumors and damaged tissues release adenosine, which engages the A2A receptor on immune cells and signals them to stand down. Caffeine antagonizes (i.e., blocks) this receptor.
Mechanism 2: Raising intracellular cAMP (immunosuppressive) Caffeine also inhibits phosphodiesterase, the enzyme that hydrolyzes (i.e., breaks down) cAMP. cAMP accumulates inside immune cells, which acts as a "calm down" signal.
Note: both mechanisms are dose-dependent. At dietary caffeine levels, A2A antagonism likely dominates, whereas PDE inhibition is weak and mainly relevant at higher concentrations. However, the net immune effect in the tumor microenvironment remains unproven.
---
If you would like to learn more, I can outline a framework for technical folks to ease in and become more informed on cancer. Gaps abound. The more people who understand cancer, the faster we get to cures. Moreover, personalized cancer treatment is the obvious future. Knowledge acquired now may pay off later (but hopefully not needed).
On second thought, I will publish something regardless of interest.
It will be an "Cancer for Engineers" framework, delivered via free, open-source Custom GPTs and Claude Skills. (Gemini gems are less reliable in our experience.)
The goal: to ease engineers into cancer via AI personalized introductory curriculums with varying time commitments to enable deeper independent investigation or fast exits if interest wanes: 4 hours, 8 hours, 12 hours.
Basically 1-3 hours per week for a month.
The reason I think some engineers may find cancer interesting, aside from the societal impact:
The human body is like a complex operating system. Cancer is a severe runtime error. Tracing root causes -- like genetic mutations, signaling errors, or immune evasion -- has many parallels to diagnosing system failures.
BTW if anyone from Kaggle/GDM is reading this, we are having issues submitting a benchmark paper for NeurIPS based on the Kaggle Benchmark.
Google models seem to get a different scheduling priority, ironically, enough and take >20 hours to complete a benchmark task that other models like Opus 4.6 finish in <1 hour -- same code path, same task. Would love help if possible since the abstract deadline is Monday (It's last minute because we didn't originally plan to submit this, but someone suggested it.)
cancer is more like debugging a gigantic DL model than an operating system. spaghetti of redundancies all the way down.
I'm always up for learning more about everything. Point me in the right direction?
Absolutely. I was recently diagnosed with MPN, an odd “you’re probably fine” blood cancer, looking to learn everything.
"While caffeine is the major individual component of coffee, the study suggests that it may not be the primary driver of these health effects."
All you haters that give me grief for drinking my daily cup of decaf can shut up now.
The decaf tries to warn you itself with its bright carafe colorings. In nature that means "Do not touch me, I am poison."
Are you familiar with the process of extracting the caffeine in decaf?
Unfortunately it isn't without potential downsides.
Yes, I know the four main methods of decaffeination. The haters have gone down this road with me many times. Why can't people just let me drink my decaf? It's like they can't enjoy their caffeine unless everybody does. It's weirdly pushy.
I don't think GP was criticizing you for liking decaf. Just pointing out that the decaf process may have affects on the beneficial compounds that aren't caffeine.
True. I love black coffee, decaf or not. Just thought it was worth pointing out since the thread is about health benefits
My initial charitable reading -- as someone who sometimes dabbles in decaf -- is that decaffeination has the bad side effect of stripping flavors, and likely many of the other biologically active chemicals. I can see from their further posts that they were more interested in unscientific fear mongering instead.
That said, I do think there is some truth that decaf is lacking (including via supercritical CO2) and I wonder how long until we could have a product like genetically engineered coffee plants that produce everything except caffeine. I'd like that, though I can immediately see an issue with growing a plant without its natural pesticide.
By "All you haters that give me grief for drinking my daily cup of decaf can shut up now", you are implying that decaf has the same health benefits of real coffee. That's not proven. And if you weren't meaning to imply that, there was no point to that reply.
There are multiple methods that James hoffman breaks down in this video iirc, if anyone is curious.
https://youtu.be/yYTSdlOdkn0?si=uAo3pipjBA91OV5V
Supercritical CO2 extraction is pretty innocuous. Just buy good decaf from a place that doesn’t bathe their beans in toxic waste.
Good to know. Any recommendations where to find this?
Why should someone hate on you just because you enjoy decaf?
It's common amongst "real men" types. It's basically making fun of someone because they actually like coffee and aren't just drinking it for the drug.
if you love coffee, drinking decaf can let you do it all day.
I'm all for decaf 100%.
I love coffee. It's good for you, it smells and tastes so good. It wakes you up, and prevents sleepiness after meals. Its stimulant nature is a plus, but not necessarily the main thing.
Unfortunately the most flavorful methods (espresso, french press, moka) also raise your cholesterol. So sadly, no, coffee is not universally "good for you". Filtered coffee methods are though, as the filter absorbs the oils.
Which is why Italians and Greeks famously all die young of heart disease
Always so cute how fellow coffee lovers will loudly boast the health benefits of coffee, but when you add an asterisk they will see it as a personal attack and respond strongly :)
Coffee is not what defines your identity. It's fine to admit it isn't perfect.
The slight cholesterol boost from those doesn't matter... It's like saying that a banana is radioactive. Let me guess, it's bad to eat fat aswell?
There are far worse foods that spike your cholesterol, irrelevant point you've made
My point is not that unfiltered coffee is good, I’m just saying that northern italians who eat dessert for breakfast, cook everything in lard, drink unfiltered coffee and even (gasp) sometimes smoke cigarettes are significantly healthier than Americans on every metric.
Not saying those things are necessarily good for you, I’m just saying we don’t seem to understand this stuff very well
Probably because they don't consume gobs of HFCS and ultra-processed foods, don't take the car for every single thing[0], and have obesity/overweight rates that are 20-40% lower. A healthier work-life balance and concomitant lower cortisol and blood pressure also helps a lot.
If you compare Italians and Greeks to, say, Swedes and Dutchies, you'd get a much different picture.
[0] not entirely Americans their personal fault, their urban design isn't for walking around
>and even (gasp) sometimes smoke cigarettes are significantly healthier than Americans on every metric.
Not just "sometimes". Less these days, but when they were recognized as blue zones decades ago almost everybody smoked like chimneys.
If something has several clear positive effects, and a possible small, arguably irrelevant, negative effect, most people will agree that yes, it's good for you.
It's like trying to argue that running may have a negative effect on some people's meniscus under some specific circumstances. That doesn't negate the generalization "running is good for you".
Pour over is flavorful and none of the fat
Paper filters give you massive amounts of microplastics
Sorry brother but the worry around cholesterol - especially in the context of the US - is not stemming from people drinking too much coffee. If you have high cholesterol there are 15 other things you should probably be cutting down on. This is similar to people who tell people to watch the sugar content in their fruit intake. No ones getting obese off fruit, the benefits outweigh the negatives tenfold.
I would be very cautious about any conclusions regarding its health benefits or detriments. Nutrition research is notoriously difficult to replicate or show causal links in humans engaging with the real world.
Texas A&M also has a coffee research center dedicated to promoting and protecting global coffee trade and consumption so… yeah.
Sure, but it's also the best we got.
That's why I moved to decaf. Love coffee, caffeine doesn't like me.
FYI since many people don't know: Decaf isn't zero, it can still be several percentage points. In the US decaf is supposed to be under 3% of regular coffee but it's not commonly tested or enforced, so many types of decaf can be quite a bit higher. Several big cups of decaf can approach the caffeine content of one regular cup.
> Several big cups of decaf can approach the caffeine content of one regular cup
Do you have a source for this? Because it doesn't sound right to me. And also, I live in a coffee producing company, work adjacent to the coffee industry, and had a long conversation with someone planning to set up a business exporting green beans to the US, and their beans were getting tested to an extreme degree and being rejected for a few ppm over on certain things.
I have heard the 3% rule but fyi it's 1% in the EU and since there's actually not that many large scale decaffeination factories in the world, as far as I know they all target the EU level.
If you buy small batch, large batch, or somewhere in between it's probably been processed in one of these few large factories.
I am definitely going to do this as I age, I just don't need the stimulant effects as much anymore. That said, the ritual of getting coffee and sipping on something warm in the morning is really important to starting my day right.
Sadly, I can't. I tried all the decaf beans in my area and even some fancy online roastery specialized only in decaf beans, and they all tasted like ass, compared to their caffeinated cousins. So much money wasted trying to find good tasting decaf beans.
Not sure what the decaffeination process does, but it definitely does not preserve the taste of the "untouched" beans. Are my tastebuds too sensitive?
I love coffee, so this is a nice read. Couple years ago I switched to french press, fresh beans (grind on demand) & no milk or sugar - okay, a dash of full cream milk sometimes. Has to be strong - you can't drink weak coffee like that!
Seems to also be relevant for yerba mate which also contains chemical compounds that bind to NR4A1
I need more dopamine headlines like this to justify my dopamine addiction to coffee.
Not everything is dopamine. Maybe nitpicky on my end but it gets tiresome when everyone is just like dopamine this, dopamine that, when no one really understands neurotransmitters.
Haha, I viewed a video recently (in French) that said « dopamine is right-wing ».
It was ironic but interesting : dopamine is viewed as THE neurotransmitter of motivation while in fact it’s only one part of the mechanism. But it’s the part everyone is bragging about because it supports the idea that you can control your dopamine levels and be responsible of your own motivation.
The whole point of the argument was that your serotonin and noradrenaline levels were as much as important if not more, and, fat chance, you cannot buy serotonin or noradrenaline supplements. You have to be in mentally in a good place to get those right and that’s not something you have that much control over. Especially your noradrenaline levels are strongly tied to the quality of your environment and that’s why you should politically fight for a better life environment.
I wonder whether decaf still contains these chemicals. I drank two cups of decaf every day.
TFA mentions that decaf contains these properties as well.
Not exactly, the article says that the effects aren't linked to caffeine, not that decaf has been shown to have the positive effects or still contain the necessary chemicals.
"This may help explain why both regular and decaffeinated coffee have been associated with similar health benefits in large population studies." --TFA
I was never a coffee drinker, but I became interested because what was said in Arnold Schwarzenegger‘s newsletter. ( There is a ton of medical research covered in there. )
I didn’t dig in too deeply, but started drinking a morning cup of sugar free double mocha cappuccino, to help my workouts.
If I’m fooling myself, don’t tell me. I like the cappuccino.
Nice, maybe it balances out nicotine. People who don't pair caffeine with nicotine simply have no clue what they are missing ;)
> People who don't pair caffeine with nicotine simply have no clue what they are missing ;)
We do, and that's called cancer;)
Is there research that links nicotine to cancer? I’m unable to find anything that would suggest nicotine as cancer causing.
Are you researching whether you'll get cancer if you are extracting 100% pure nicotine and ingesting it? Who does that?
Most nicotine users today? Everyone’s using the pure nicotine pouches like zyn and such. I didn’t really find it enjoyable at all
> Most nicotine users today?
I did use pure nicotine and it was very bad for my health, probably due to high dosage, but still.
I've used heavy stimulants, benzos, opioids, dissociatives without an issue, but nicotine is in a class of its own in terms of how insidiously addictive it is.
But just from a health point of view: extreme arm and hand joint issues, forearm vascular issues that made my hands numb at night, palpitations/arrithmia like I was about to die when I used nicotine before sleep and I was drifting to sleep -- it really felt like I was about to die, like my heart was mangled up.
A lot of people consume nicotine. It has been isolated and used in products for a long time. There's no clear link to cancer, but it could impact cardiovascular health (like all stimulants seem to).
Some research indicates that nicotine can influence how existing cancer behaves and spreads, so that's worth considering.
Right, point taken, but I wasn't following how nicotine properties were connected to coffee's health benefits.
He was suggesting— jokingly— that maybe coffee cancels out the deleterious effects of smoking, because indeed coffee + a cigar or pipe is truly an excellent experience.
Mentat-mode engaged
zingababba started this thread talking about mixing caffeine and nicotine.
I quit smoking a long time ago but if there's one thing I'm missing / craving is a hot cup of coffee with two cigarettes on an empty stomach during cold winter mornings... Fuuuuck.
"Serious delirium!"