That’s no secret Coffee brings joy to people all over the world. It warms the soul, boosts concentration and brings people together, not to mention that it smells and tastes heavenly.
Science just showed that The smell of coffee can wake us upAnd luckily for coffee fans, there are also health benefits. Coffee is a source of anti-inflammatory antioxidants And Drinking before a workout has fat burning benefits.
Now, a new study suggests that adding a dash of protein-rich milk may boost the health benefits of your cup of coffee.
Researchers at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark looked at how antioxidants called polyphenols interact with amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, and found that their combination was twice as powerful in fighting cellular inflammation as polyphenols alone.
polyphenols can be found in many foods including coffee and tea, fruits and vegetables, red wine and beer. As with other antioxidants, previous studies suggest some Polyphenols can prevent and slow down the oxidation of healthy chemicals And protects our body from diseases.
They are thought to do this in part by controlling inflammation, a complex immune response involving cells macrophages that release multiple inflammatory mediators. Inflammation protects against infection, but if not properly controlled, it can lead to diseases like type II diabetes, AlzheimerAnd Parkinson’s.
caffeic acid (CA) and chlorogenic acid (CGA) are polyphenols known to have antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects, but the authors wanted to find out if reactions these polyphenols have with other chemicals can further affect immune regulation.
adducts are products that are formed when two or more molecules come together. In this case, the amino acid cysteine (Cys) found in dairy products was combined with the polyphenols CA and CGA found in coffee to form the adducts CA–Cys and CGA–Cys.
To support this research, the authors successfully demonstrated in another new study that polyphenols bind to proteins in a coffee drink with milk.
“Our result shows that the reaction between polyphenols and proteins also occurs in some of the coffee drinks with milk that we studied. In fact, the reaction is so rapid that it hasn’t been difficult to avoid in any of the foods we’ve studied.” until now,” says food scientist and co-author on both studies Marianne Nissen Lund.
In this study, researchers used RNA sequencing to examine the immunoregulatory effects of CA-Cys and CGA-Cys in macrophage cells exposed to artificial inflammation.
They also tested the effects of CA and CGA alone and compared them to a control group of macrophages that were not exposed to the polyphenols or the Cys adducts.
As expected, the polyphenols CA and CGA inhibited inflammatory responses, particularly the production of reactive oxygen species (ROS), prostaglandin E2 (PGE2) and the cytokines interleukin-6 And tumor necrosis factor (TNF).
But when the polyphenols CA and CGA were combined with the amino acids cysteine found in milk proteins, their anti-inflammatory effects received a boost.
For example, macrophage cells exposed to polyphenols alone exhibited more than 2.5-fold as much TNF activity as when exposed to a polyphenol-cysteine adduct.
The only exception was ROS, which inexplicably increased in the macrophages when the polyphenol-amino acid combination was present compared to the presence of the polyphenol alone.
“It is interesting to have now observed the anti-inflammatory effect in cell experiments. And obviously that has only made us more interested in understanding these health effects in more detail. So the next step will be to study the effects in animals. ” says immunologist and senior author Andrew Williams.
Further research is needed to find out why and what these findings practically mean for human health. This study only examined how a single type of immune mediator responds to coffee-like chemicals in a laboratory setting.
“Our results can serve as an important reference for applications of adducts of phenolic compounds and amino acids in future functional foods or drugs aimed at modulating metabolic, neurological or immune-related diseases,” say the researchers close in their work.
To which we raise a cup of Java!
The research was published in the Journal of Agriculture and food chemistry.
