Drinking specific types of coffee has now been proven to be good to brain health by scientists, but how does this popular brew boost cognitive function? A recent study uncovers some of the ways by which coffee can help prevent mental decline.
According to the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston, MA, around 54 percent of all adults in the United States consume coffee every day.
While coffee has both positive and negative effects on one’s health, a 2016 study from the University of Ulster in Coleraine, UK, found that the positive effects “clearly outweigh” the negative effects.
This includes preventing cognitive decline and improving thinking skills.
Why is coffee so good for your brain and how does this happen? These are some of the questions that the Krembil Brain Institute, is attempting to answer in a this study.
“Coffee consumption does seem to have some correlation to a decreased risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease,” says Dr. Donald Weaver, co-director of the Krembil Brain Institute.
“But we wanted to investigate why that is — which compounds are involved and how they may impact age-related cognitive decline.”
The findings of Dr. Weaver and colleagues, which were published in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience, reveal that the secret to coffee’s brain-protective benefits is the presence of chemicals released during the roasting process.
The researchers opted to investigate the effects of three different varieties of coffee in this study: caffeinated dark roast, caffeinated light roast, and decaffeinated dark roast.
“The caffeinated and decaffeinated dark roast both had identical potencies in our initial experimental tests. So we observed early on that its protective effect could not be due to caffeine,” adds study co-author Dr. Ross Mancini.
Phenylindanes, the compounds formed during the roasting process of coffee beans, were eventually linked to everything else researchers were looking at.
Phenylindanes, more than any other coffee-related substances, appear to prevent tau and beta-amyloid from combining. These are toxic proteins, and their overabundance in the brain is a major role in neurodegenerative diseases including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
“So phenylindanes are a dual inhibitor. Very interesting, we were not expecting that,” says Dr. Weaver.
A longer roasting time tends to cause the coffee beans to create more phenylindanes. This implies that dark roasted coffee, whether normal or decaf, provides the most brain protection.
“It’s the first time anybody’s investigated how phenylindanes interact with the proteins that are responsible for Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s,” adds Dr. Mancini.
The researchers plan to dig deeper into the properties of phenylindanes and their impact on the body once they’ve been taken in the future.
“The next step would be to investigate how beneficial these compounds are, and whether they have the ability to enter the bloodstream, or cross the blood-brain barrier,” says Dr. Mancini.
Another intriguing feature of this discovery for the researchers is that these coffee chemicals are natural and do not require laboratory production, making them easier to generate.
In the meanwhile, Dr. Mancini emphasizes that additional research into the therapeutic effects of phenylindanes is required before they can be considered a treatment option for neurodegenerative disorders.
“What this study does is take the epidemiological evidence and try to refine it and to demonstrate that there are indeed components within coffee that are beneficial to warding off cognitive decline,” adds Dr. Mancini.
“It’s interesting, but are we suggesting that coffee is a cure? Absolutely not.”
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