In this fast-paced era where everyone is “just grinding through,” coffee has become an almost indispensable “life-support potion.”
Yet the controversy around coffee has never stopped…
Recently, a research team from the Harbin Medical University Cancer Hospital published a major study in the international journal European Journal of Nutrition.
The study found that chronically elevated caffeine levels in the blood are linked to a 54% higher risk of lung cancer.
First, caffeine weakens the body’s antioxidant defense system.
Without that layer of protection, cells become easier to “attack” from outside, and DNA can be damaged — which is precisely the key pathway to lung cell carcinogenesis.
Second, caffeine has a hidden identity: it is an inhibitor of ATM kinase.
When a cell’s DNA is damaged, ATM kinase triggers the cell’s “self-apoptosis” program, but caffeine sabotages that plan. The damaged cells keep “lingering,” and the risk of cancer rises substantially.
Although this study did find an association between caffeine and lung cancer, each person metabolizes caffeine at a different rate, so caffeine’s effects vary widely.
Moreover, the subjects were Finns, whose diet and living environment differ from ours, so whether the findings apply to Chinese people needs further verification.
In addition, many people assume switching to “decaffeinated coffee” avoids caffeine’s side effects, but the reality may not be so simple.
Many “decaf” coffees on the market use dichloromethane to remove caffeine during processing, a substance recognized as a Group 2B carcinogen.
On whether regularly drinking decaf carries cancer risk, a research team from Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health published new findings in Annals of Oncology.
After a preliminary study of 121,337 respondents, they found that men who drink one extra cup of decaf per day see lung cancer risk rise 8%, and women 4%.
But this study, too, has a flaw: when the researchers limited the population to “never smokers,” the lung-cancer-related risk disappeared for both men and women. That suggests the real culprit behind the higher lung cancer risk may be “smoking.”
Although decaf coffee narrowly escaped lung cancer, it does carry other cancer risks —
The same study further found that, compared with men who do not drink decaf, men who drink one extra cup per day see bladder cancer risk rise 6%. More importantly, even after excluding smokers, the risk not only fails to drop but climbs to 12%.
In other words, regardless of smoking status, men who regularly drink decaf face a higher risk of bladder cancer.
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