If there’s anything like a schism in the coffee world, it would be about which is a superior expression, espresso or filtered coffee. (There are of course various other heretics, the French press sect for instance, but coffee is mainly a two-party system.) Even if they love both, most folks will have one that they prefer over the other.
So which is better? Well, the most obvious way to parse this, and I think every coffee person will agree with me on this one, is by determining which has a positive impact on your body’s HbA1c levels. And wouldn’t you know it, a new study finds that filtered coffee, my personal favorite, has a causal link to healthier HbA1c levels. Case closed.
HbA1ca is biomarker that “reflects a person’s average blood glucose levels over the preceding 8 to 12 weeks and is one of the primary measurements used in managing Type 2 diabetes, which is expected to impact over 643 million people by 2030. It is a health crisis, and understanding HbA1c may be key in helping control it.
That’s why researchers wanted to determine how environmental factors, like coffee consumption, impacted HbA1c levels. As reported by News-Medical.net, past studies have been a bit ambiguous, leading to researchers from Peking University in Beijing to hypothesize that the type of coffee consumed may be the cause of the discrepancy.
For their study, they used data from Genome-Wide Association Studies part of the UK Biobank as well as gut microbiota genetic data from the MiBioGen consortium that contains over 18,000 participants. Coffee consumption was broken down into six different categories: filtered coffee, caffeinated coffee, coffee with added milk, sugar, or artificial sweeteners, and milk added to instant coffee.
Using Mendelian Randomization, “a method that uses genetic variants as instrumental variables to infer causal relationship between and exposure (coffee habits) and an outcome (HbA1c levels),” they determined that filtered coffee, and only filtered coffee, had a “significant causal association with reduced HbA1c” levels. The rest didn’t show any protective effect.
Examining the gut microbiota, filtered coffee was found to be genetically associated with higher levels of a bacteria called Veillonella, which does much of a heavy lifting in lowering HbA1ic levels. Of the four bacterial strains analyzed, Veillonella made up 43% of filtered coffee’s glycemic benefits. Adding sugar to coffee, meanwhile, expressed “a borderline significant negative association with Veillonella.”
So there you have it. Filter coffee for the win. I mean, I guess you could argue with science if you want, who knows, maybe it’d earn you a Cabinet position, but it seems unwise to me.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
