Coffee protects against radiation, type 2 diabetes, cancers

HUMANS HAVE been consuming coffee for over 2,000 years. Its ingredient caffeine raised questions about its health effects. Early studies involving bacteria and cultured mammalian cells suggested that caffeine could be harmful. Further, the cells exposed to ultraviolet light and then treated with caffeine, showed an increase in damage. By 1960s, coffee came to be regarded as slightly harmful.

Accidental discovery

The case of coffee as a harmful dietary agent would have been closed, but for an accidental discovery in 1971 in my laboratory at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi.

The experiments then designed were to find out how caffeine enhances radiation-induced biological damage. The choice of barley seeds due to lack of facilities then to work with mammalian cells turned out to be a blessing. It is known that biological damage induced by X-ray and gamma rays is increased by oxygen.

In fact, the reduced levels of oxygen in rapidly growing tumours is responsible for the resistance of cancer cells in radiotherapy.

In barley seeds methods were developed to separate the radiation-induced, oxygen-dependent (oxic) pathway from the oxygen- independent (anoxic) pathway of damage.

Caffeine was expected to enhance both the oxic and anoxic components of radiation damage.

However, caffeine remarkably reduced (protected) the seeds against the oxic pathway of radiation damage, although it potentiated the anoxic component of damage.


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