Live Better, Live Longer - Softcover

Chopra, Sanjiv

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0312376936 ISBN 13: 9780312376932

Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin, 2012

Synopsis

Every day, you hear about new medical studies touted as the "next big thing that will save your life." But how can you tell which claims are real and which are bogus? Live Better, Live Longer gives you the answers.

Live Better, Live Longer explains the latest research to provide you with the most accurate medical information. You will learn about the right diet, the best cancer-screening methods, the incredible power of coffee to prevent disease, the real value of vitamins and supplements, the truth about the dangers of cell phones, the facts behind vaccinations, and the scientific information you and your family need to lead a happier and healthier life.

About this title

About the Author

Dr. Sanjiv Chopra is professor of medicine and faculty dean for continuing medical education at Harvard Medical School. He is a senior consultant in hepatology at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. He is the editor-in-chief of UpToDate in Gastroenterology and Hepatology, has more than one hundred publications and four specialist books to his credit, and is the author of Leadership by Example. With his brother, Deepak Chopra, he is author of Brotherhood: Dharma, Destiny, and the American Dream. He lives in Weston, Massachusetts.

Dr. Alan Lotvin is a cardiologist by training and practice. He lives in Hopkinton, Massachusetts.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1. Is Coffee Truly a Lifesaver?
 
 
Often I begin my lectures by asking everyone in the audience who has at least two cups of coffee most days to raise their hands. Usually, the majority of people do so. Then I ask how many of them have at least four cups a day, and fewer hands are raised. Finally I ask how many of them average six or more cups of coffee a day. In response there is always some nervous laughter and rarely more than a few hands raised. That’s when I surprise my audience: “Good for you,” I tell those few people. “You’re doing your liver a big favor.”
Coming from me, a liver specialist, that is high praise indeed.
In the past, drinking too much coffee supposedly had been linked to a variety of health problems including heart attacks, birth defects, pancreatic cancer, osteoporosis, and miscarriages. We do know that coffee can cause insomnia, tremors, and it can raise blood pressure and increase urination. But more recent evidence indicates that rather than being dangerous, coffee may also offer substantial benefits, including protection against heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, liver cirrhosis, Parkinson’s disease, cavities, colon cancer, prostate cancer, and even suicide. It is known to bring relief for asthma, increase endurance and concentration—some major league baseball players are known to drink as many as six cups of coffee during a game—and increase the absorption of other medications. It can be used to treat headaches—popular over-the-counter pain medications contain as much caffeine per pill as a large cup of joe. And contrary to conventional wisdom, it appears to lower the risk of being hospitalized for an arrhythmia. What is most surprising is that so few people realize how much value there is in a cup of coffee. Or, in fact, several cups of coffee.
What is most surprising is that so few people realize how much value there is in a cup of coffee.
According to legend, in about 1000 A.D. the shepherd Kaldi from the province of Kaffa in Ethiopia noticed that the sheep in one pasture were far more active than those in the nearby herds. The cause of that, he determined, were the odd “cherries” they were eating. He tried one himself—and felt its energizing effects. Soon the local monks were using this fruit to help them stay awake at night. Eventually coffee was exported to Yemen and the first known coffeehouse opened in Istanbul in 1471. Initially, the conservative religious leaders of the Middle East forbade it because of its stimulating abilities, but eventually it spread throughout Europe and became a popular and profitable beverage. By 1675 there were more than 3,000 coffeehouses in England.
The health benefits of coffee have been debated for centuries. Coffee has been blamed for everything from infertility to causing rebellions. In 1674, for example, English women complained that this “nauseous Puddle-water ... has Eunucht our Husbands ... they are become as impotent as Age.”
But while many people still believe coffee can be dangerous, numerous large studies indicate that drinking coffee actually provides considerable protection against several serious diseases and—this is even more remarkable—many people should be drinking more coffee, not less.
Many people should be drinking more coffee, not less.
While most medical studies begin with a specific premise to be tested, considerable information can be gleaned from statistical analysis of information collected with no specific goal. One of the largest of those observational collections was compiled by the Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program. KP had been founded during World War II as a prepayment medical plan for employees of Kaiser Shipyards and expanded coverage after the war. In the 1960s, according to cardiologist Dr. Arthur Klatsky, an investigator at that company’s research division, “Kaiser Permanente began a study to determine which [medical] tests were worth doing and which tests were not. This involved setting up a computerized database to store information from health-checkup examinations. Although the computers were rudimentary, the database made it possible to perform a study of heart attack predictors matching a wide diversity of known risk factors. The study was conceived by Dr. Gary D. Friedman as basically a search for new heart attack predictors.
“Counting all history queries and measurements, there were about 500 items and some of them would prove predictive of heart attacks. One was that abstinence from alcohol predicted a higher risk from heart attacks compared to light or moderate drinkers. That was not a pre-study hypothesis and it led us to further explore alcohol and health. I was able to obtain grant money to create a new data base about alcohol habits from 1978 to 1985. It consisted of about 129,000 people from a multi-ethnic group. We used that data base to look at subsequent medical events—for example, hospitalization or death from a specific cause, like heart disease or cancer. We published the alcohol–heart attack study in 1974.”
Another study from the same database, first published in 1992 and updated in 2006, reported an inverse relationship between coffee and liver cirrhosis. Coffee lowered the blood level of liver enzymes; astonishingly, the study found that the more coffee people drank, the less chance they would develop alcoholic cirrhosis. Each cup daily accounted for a 20 percent reduction in risk. For example, alcohol drinkers could reduce the chance of cirrhosis by 80 percent by drinking four cups of coffee daily.
The reason for this is not known. “Epidemiology doesn’t determine mechanisms,” explained Dr. Klatsky, “it usually shows only associations. I was surprised at the strength of the apparent protection. When you see something that is reduced 60, 70, 80 percent, that is a very major reduction risk. That’s what we found in the relationship between heavy coffee drinking and the likelihood of developing cirrhosis. It’s very important to mention that the best way to reduce the risk of alcoholic cirrhosis is to limit alcohol intake, not to cover heavy drinking by taking coffee.
“I wish we knew a lot more about the coffee-cirrhosis link. We wish we knew what type of coffee people drink, whether they put cream or sugar in it, whether they filter it, whether it’s caffeinated or decaffeinated, but all we know is the number of cups per day. We did a subsample of about 10,000 people, and people who drink a lot of coffee, generally four or more cups a day, almost always drink caffeinated coffee.”
Personally, Dr. Klatsky states, he has “two cups of coffee in the morning and sometimes a cup at noon, but otherwise it keeps me awake. Three’s my maximum.”
The curious benefits of coffee reported in this study may possibly extend to other diseases affecting the liver. In August 2007, the journal Hepatology reported that 10 different studies, conducted in Europe and Japan, showed that people who drink coffee have a significantly reduced chance of developing liver cancer. The studies included about 240,000 people, including 2,260 suffering from liver cancer, and showed that people who drank at least several cups of coffee every day had less than half the chance of being diagnosed with liver cancer than study participants who drank no coffee—the odds dropped by 23 percent with each daily cup. As in Dr. Klasky’s study, there was no attempt made to determine the reason for this decline in liver cancer, that’s the type of work done in laboratories by scientists, though there is some speculation that coffee causes liver enzymes to become stronger.
It has been my experience—and this is anecdotal evidence—that coffee lowers liver enzymes, which is quite desirable, prevents liver fibrosis (scarring), reduces the rate of hospitalization from chronic liver disease, and reduces the risk of eventually developing liver cancer. We know that coffee is insulin sensitizing; there are people whose pancreas produces sufficient insulin but for some reason it does not have its desired target effect. Coffee sensitizes cells to insulin so that it does have the necessary effect. Another recent study from the Harvard School of Public Health, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, showed that coffee drinkers have high levels of plasma adiponectin—that’s important because low levels of plasma adiponectin have been linked with aggressive liver disease. And finally, four cups of coffee a day has been shown to reduce the incidence of very painful gout by as much as half.
This impact on insulin may have another vitally important benefit. While previous studies had failed to find a link between coffee drinking and prostate cancer, a National Institutes of Health–funded study published in 2009 followed 50,000 male health professionals for two decades and found that men who drank six or more cups of caffeinated or decaffeinated coffee daily reduced their chances of developing advanced prostate cancer by 60 percent, men who had four or five cups saw a 25 percent reduction, and drinking up to three cups provided a 20 percent lower risk compared to people who did not drink coffee.
While the reasons for this impact are not known, one of the authors of the study, Harvard’s Kathryn Wilson, speculated, “Coffee has effects on insulin and glucose metabolism as well as sex hormone levels, all of which play a role in prostate cancer.”
If that’s all it did it would still be remarkable, but there is a rapidly growing body of evidence that it has other real benefits. No one can patent coffee, not even Starbucks, so studies about the effects of coffee have to be conducted by large public-oriented groups. Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health and Brigham and Women’s Hospital conducted their own 125,000-person study from 1980 to 1998, which revealed another impressive be...

About this edition

• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0312376936
• ISBN 13: 9780312376932
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 496