Newsletter #85: Filtered Coffee, Chili Peppers, and Beetroot Juice 🌶️
Hello Friends!
Welcome to the winter solstice edition of the humanOS newsletter! 🎄🎅 We hope everyone is enjoying a happy and healthy holiday season. Of course, regardless of the time of year, we never stop reading and researching. 🤓 Below is our newest work, plus the various studies and media that caught our attention this week.
This Week’s Research Highlights
🌶️ Chili peppers are associated with substantially reduced risk of death.
Researchers performed a longitudinal analysis on 22811 men and women enrolled in the Moli-sani Study cohort. Chili pepper intake was estimated by the EPIC Food Frequency Questionnaire and categorized as none/rare consumption, up to 2 times/week, >2 to ≤4 times/week, and >4 times/week. Over a median follow-up of 8.2 years, regular (more than four times per week) consumption of chili peppers was found to be associated with 23% lower risk of all-cause mortality and 34% reduced risk of death from cardiovascular disease. Interestingly, this association was independent of traditional cardiovascular risk factors, as well as adherence to a Mediterranean diet.
💪🏽 Dietary nitrate from beetroot can improve endothelial function in older adults.
In a randomized, double-blind, crossover design, fifteen healthy older men attended two experimental sessions and consumed either 140 mL of concentrated beetroot juice (800 mg NO3-), or a placebo beverage (beetroot juice that had been depleted of NO3-). Placebo, unsurprisingly, had no effect on vascular markers, but the concentrated beetroot juice produced improvements in endothelial function (+1.18 ± 0.94% increase in flow-mediated dilation), as well as a reduction in arterial stiffness. To learn more about dietary nitrate, check out these blogs and past interview.
☕ Coffee is associated with reduced risk of type 2 diabetes - but only if it is filtered.
Researchers examined data from two groups of participants in a Swedish prospective cohort study, who had provided blood samples at baseline and ten years later. One group had developed diabetes, the other group was comprised of matched healthy controls. The researchers looked at surveys of what the subjects had been drinking, but also analyzed the blood samples for metabolites associated with either boiled or filtered coffee intake. Using these biomarkers, the researchers found that people who drank two to three cups of filtered coffee a day had a 60% lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes than people who drank less than one cup of filtered coffee a day. Importantly, consumption of boiled coffee (like through a French press) had no impact on diabetes risk.
New humanOS Features
- humanOS Yearly Pro Plan: You can now purchase one full year of humanOS Pro, in lieu of the monthly subscription, at a 20% discount! 💁♀️
- Course Enhancement: We have added Talking Points to the third course ( Food Environment) in the Ideal Weight Program. 🙌
FYI: Talking Points is a feature that is unlocked once you complete a course (just click on the achievement badge), and offers a useful recap of key takeaways from the lessons to aid memory retention, and hopefully enhance your ability to use that information and convey it to others. No point in studying something if you can’t use that info later, right?
Videos We Loved This Week
- Jesse Gomez: This is your brain on Pokémon. Via Science Friday.
- James Levine: The dangers of sitting. Via the ACSM.
Products We Are Enjoying
Beet It Nitrate Sport Shots
Beetroot is a rich source of nitrate, which relaxes the walls of the arteries when it transforms to nitric oxide. Wider blood vessels = better blood flow, which makes it easier for blood to get to your muscles without increasing the workload of the heart. Obviously good for athletic performance, and perhaps also for vascular health, as mentioned above. These highly concentrated juices efficiently deliver 400 mg of nitrate per serving in a portable 2.4 ounce shot. Incidentally, Beet It happens to be the product that researchers, including Jonathan Burdette from Wake Forest, have used to examine effects of dietary nitrate.