If you could only choose one part of your body that coffee would benefit, what would it be? Maybe it sounds a little bit like a riddle, and it kind of is. So then what’s the answer to the coffee quandry?
The elegant answer (or the smug one, depending upon how you feel about riddles: your cells.
It’s a bit of a cop-out, but also, it might be true? A new study has found that coffee works on a cellular level to keep you living longer and healthier.
As reported by Science Daily, the study is the work of researchers from the School of Biological and Behavioral Sciences at Queen Mary University of London and was published recently in the journal Microbial Cell. In it, they examine how caffeine impacts cellular function, particularly the systems associated with longevity.
The same team of researchers had in the past uncovered how caffeine helps cells live longer by affecting a growth regulator called Target of Rapamycin (TOR), which is “a biological switch that tells cells when to grow, based on how much food and energy is available” and has been “controlling energy and stress responses in living things for over 500 million years.”
This latest paper is an expansion on that work, seeking to uncover the mechanisms behind caffeine’s effect on TOR. For this, they gave caffeine to fission yeast, a single-celled organism that works in a strikingly similar fashion to human cells, specifically TOR. They found that caffeine doesn’t affect TOR directly, but activates a different cellular system called AMPK. It is essentially a cellular fuel gauge.
“When your cells are low on energy, AMPK kicks in to help them cope,” states the study’s senior author Dr. Charalampos Rallis. In the fission yeast, caffeine helped activate the AMPK switch, which then led to AMPK positively influencing how the yeast cells grew, repaired DNA, and responded to stress. These are all tied to how humans age and fight disease.
Caffeine’s effect on AMPK works similarly to a common diabetes drug used to extend an individual’s lifespan, and the findings give hope to researchers that they may be able to uncover additional natural means of doing so. Like drinking coffee.
So drink up, and make sure you are getting enough for all 37 trillion of your cells to get a taste. Probably should start another pot.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
