United States: A big team of doctors and researchers from all around the world discovered that people who drink coffee regularly have more of a special kind of healthy bacteria in their stomachs than people who don’t drink coffee. The researchers studied poop and blood samples from many people and looked at health data to understand how coffee affects our gut. Their findings were published in a medical journal called Nature Microbiology.
This work was outlined in a News & Views piece published in the same journal issue by Jeffrey Gordon and Nathan McNulty, both with the Washington University School of Medicine.
As reported by the Medicalxpress, previous research has demonstrated that consumption of food and drinks has impacts on the gut biome — the community of fungi, yeast and bacteria that reside in the human gastrointestinal tract. However, not well understood are which foods promote a healthy biome and which are dangerous.
In this new study, the team wanted to better understand how a single food alters the microbiome. They chose coffee for two reasons: Because it’s eaten so much or … it’s eaten a lot or it’s not eaten at all, or it’s eaten every day or not at all.
First, the researchers analyzed medical data of some 22,800 people in the U.K. and U.S., and of another 54,200 people in 211 cohorts to learn how coffee consumption affected the gut biome. They were then able to compare data from people who drank coffee and those who didn’t and look for differences in the gut biome between the two.
But the population numbers of a bacteria, Lawsonibacter asaccharolyticus, were the one major difference the researchers found between the two groups. For instance, coffee drinkers had levels 8 times higher than those who didn’t—and the difference persisted for everywhere drinkers around the globe.
They don’t really know what effect higher levels of L. asaccharolyticus have on people but speculate that it is probably related to health benefits attributed to coffee drinking. They say there are big effects of a single food or drink on our gut biome.