Coffee and Depression: Coffee as an Antidepressant?

You're just trying to get that morning pick me up to get your day going. When you grab that morning cup of java, you're probably not thinking of it as an antidepressant.

It acts on the central nervous system and has mild antidepressant effects. However, recent studies have shown that java really does function as an antidepressant, raising the spirits of people who regularly drink the stuff.

Coffee and depression studies have found that drinking coffee reduced the rate of suicide in the large demographic populations observed.

In this study, a Kaiser Permanente Medical Care Program study of 128,934 nurses found that java drinkers were significantly less likely to commit suicide than nondrinkers. The first coffee and depression study that raised the topic of java as an antidepressant was done in 1993.

The study stated that it could be that the coffee itself had little to do with it, but that people who drink coffee share other characteristics that make them less likely to commit suicide. This Nurse's Health Study on coffee and depression did not go so far as to establish a causal relationship between java drinking and the drop in the suicide rate.

A second study on coffee and depression, however, confirmed these controversial findings and went farther as to state that it was the coffee that dropped the suicide rate. This study was especially noteworthy, as it was large-scale and adjusted for a wide range of other factors.

Published in the Archives of Internal Medicine in 1996, the study followed more than 86,000 registered nurses in the United States between 34 and 59 years of age for ten years. Dr. Ichiro Kawachi, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School who led this study, looked at the data from the Kaiser Permanente study hoping to discount their findings.

Instead of what he expected to find, he confirmed the original study's results with his own: using coffee as an antidepressant reduced the suicide rate in these nurses.

Dr. Kawachi discovered that the nurses he studied who drank two to three cups of coffee a day were one-third less likely to commit suicide as those who didn't drink any.

The nurses who drank more than four cups a day were 58% less likely to commit suicide than their colleagues who drank less. The coffee and depression study of female nurses found eleven suicides among those who drank two to three cups of caffeinated coffee per day, compared with twenty-one cases of suicide among those who said they almost never drank coffee.

However, Dr. Kawachi and others aren't ready yet to use coffee as an antidepressant for clinical depression. At the minimum, Dr. Kawachi says that his study shows that drinking lots of coffee can't be bad for your health.

Psychiatrists point out that people must understand that depression isn't simply a state of mind; it is a very serious medical issue that cannot be resolved simply by drinking coffee.

And cardiologists, while they recommend to their patients with heart and other health problems to steer clear of caffeine, know that it's not good for a patient's mental health to do so immediately in a cold turkey manner. Instead, they recommend bringing down the coffee consumption gradually in order to avoid a severe state of depression due to the drop in caffeine and other antidepressants in coffee.

Whether it is the caffeine or something else, coffee does seem to have at least a mild antidepressant effect. The caffeine in coffee may have mood-elevating actions through effects on neurotransmitters such as dopamine and acetylcholine.

It is also possible that coffee drinking has social effects, such as increasing personal contacts and time spent socializing, that might reduce thoughts of suicide.

© Copyright Randy Wilson, All Rights Reserved.

a look at the major difference between arabica and robusta coffee plant

Though generally referred to as a coffee tree due to the huge dimensions it can get to, the coffee plant is an evergreen specific to the warm subtropical areas all over the world. Though there are quite many species varieties, there are only two types of coffee plant that global economy exploits on a large scale: they are Arabica and Robusta, the two coffee kinds on which international commerce depends.

Though these two varieties of the coffee plant are used, Arabica leads beyond any trace of a doubt as it is responsible for 75% of the world coffee production, whereas Robusta only gives 20%. This huge difference comes from the coffee plant specificity of each of these subspecies. The beans produced by Robusta coffee plant are inferior in what the quality is concerned due to the higher level of caffeine that also influences taste.

Thus, Robusta coffee is a little bitter than Arabica and darker too; nevertheless, certain communities also depend on this coffee variety for economic survival. To make harvesting pretty easy or comfortable, the height of the coffee plant is kept under control on plantations, and it doesn't get to grow as high as ten meters as it would normally do, if left wild.

Another major difference between Arabica and Robusta coffee plant lies in pollination specificity: Arabica for instance is self fertilizing whereas Robusta depends on cross pollination. The full development of the coffee fruit, the delicious bean we depend on for our morning coffee, takes about thirty to thirty-five weeks after which it's time to harvest. As for the growth period of the coffee plant until it becomes fertile it ranges between four and five years.

For proper development, the coffee plant depends on a pretty high level of rainfall every year; it is sensitive to cold, however, it will not die because of accidentally cooler weather. The dependence on warm temperature makes it impossible to cultivate the coffee plant in Europe or in other similar parts of the world, where a temperate climate provides incompatible environments.

One great surprise came when a naturally decaffeinated type of coffee plant was discovered in Brazil, with a lot better flavor than the no-caffeine coffee brands manufactured at present. Flavor is usually lost because caffeine is extracted with the help of solvents, while if it be completely absent from the chemical composition of the plant, the flavor would remain untouched. Cultivating this type of coffee plant would mean a true revolution in the business, and things are not far from moving in that direction.