If there is something of a schism in the coffee world, it would be over which term is better: espresso or filter coffee. (There are of course many other heretics, such as the French press sect, but coffee is mostly a two-party system.) Even if they love both, most people will have one they prefer over the other.
So which is better? Well, the most obvious way to analyze this, and I think every coffee lover would agree with me on this, is to determine what has a positive effect on HbA1c levels in the body. And wouldn’t you know it new study shows that filter coffee, my favorite, has a causal link with healthier HbA1c levels. Case closed.
HbA1ca is a biomarker that “reflects a person’s average blood glucose level over the past 8-12 weeks and is one of the main indicators used to manage type 2 diabetes, which is estimated to affect more than 643 million people by 2030. This is a health crisis and understanding HbA1c can be crucial in helping to control it.
Therefore, researchers wanted to determine how environmental factors, such as coffee consumption, affect HbA1c levels. As reported News-Medical.netprevious studies were somewhat inconclusive, leading researchers from Peking University in Beijing to hypothesize that the type of coffee consumed may be responsible for the discrepancy.
For their study, they used data from a genome-wide association study, part of the UK Biobank, as well as genetic data on the gut microbiota from the MiBioGen consortium, which has over 18,000 participants. Coffee consumption was divided into six different categories: filtered coffee, caffeinated coffee, coffee with added milk, sugar or artificial sweeteners, and milk added to instant coffee.
Using Mendelian randomization, “a method that uses genetic variants as instrumental variables to infer a causal relationship between an exposure (coffee habits) and an outcome (HbA1c level),” they found that filter coffee and filter coffee alone had a “significant causal association with reduced HbA1c levels.” The rest showed no protective effect.
A study of intestinal microflora showed that filtered coffee is genetically associated with higher levels of a bacterium called , which greatly reduces HbA1ic levels. Of the four bacterial strains analyzed, it accounted for 43% of the glycemic benefits of filter coffee. Meanwhile, adding sugar to coffee expressed a “borderline significant negative association with…”.
So there you have it. Filter coffee to win. I mean, I guess you could argue with science if you wanted, who knows, maybe it would get you a government position, but that seems unwise to me.
