Is Your Coffee Habit Keeping You Young?

The internet is loaded with contradictory health information about one of the world’s most popular beverages: coffee. It’s good for us. It’s bad for us. Who knows?

If you’re a diehard coffee drinker, you probably don’t care—just keep the good stuff flowing! But it’s nice to think that our favorite morning habit might come with some anti-aging benefits. And yet another coffee study has provided us with just that.

A new study published in the European Journal of Nutrition suggests that drinking dark roast coffee may help prevent your DNA from breaking, which is really cool. DNA strands break pretty regularly, thanks to oxidative damage from our environments, UV light and normal cell processes. But as we age, our bodies become less and less efficient at repairing DNA breaks, which is one explanation as to why we experience the symptoms of aging. 

It seems like dark roast coffee may be able to slow that process. That’s right: coffee doesn’t just make you more productive—it may just slow down aging!

COFFEE’S ANTI-AGING ACTION

In the study, researchers deprived a group of test subjects of coffee and gave them water instead for an entire month (imagine the struggle). Then, they asked some of the participants to drink about 16 oz. of fresh dark roast daily while the control group continued to chug water.

Interestingly, those who drank coffee experienced fewer DNA strand breaks over the month than those who consumed water alone. This led researchers to conclude that dark roast has a “beneficial protective effect on human DNA integrity”.

And that likely means it has powerful anti-aging properties.

This isn’t the first study to prove that coffee is good for your DNA. There was this study in 2015, this one from 2011, and this one in 2016.

There is an interesting trend to these studies: they all use dark roast coffee. Why? That’s actually a little unclear. According to recent research, light roast coffee contains more antioxidant benefits than its dark counterpart—and they both contain comparable amounts of caffeine. But a lot of people love dark roast for its flavor, so being more popular, it is likely a more realistic bean for health research.

If you’re a light roast lover, don’t feel like you need to switch over to the dark side. The light stuff comes with the same, if not greater, perks.