'Michael Roizen, M.D. explains the many anti-aging health benefits provided by coffee. If you don't have one of the four 'unhealthy symptoms' related to coffee consumption, it is a very healthy choice due to the high polyphenol content and anti-cancerous benefits.'
Transcript:
Dr. Michael Roizen: Raena, I hope that’s coffee, because coffee is anti-aging and I heard that was what you were asking about today.
Raena Morgan: Absolutely, because I’m in that age group. I want to know.
MR: You couldn’t be!
RM: Inquiring minds want to know, old inquiring minds want to know.
MR: You don’t look that old.
RM: Oh, I’m going to be sixty-three.
MR: That’s exactly how old I am.
RM: 1946?
MR: I was born January 7th, 1946. It’s a good year.
RM: So coffees going to help?
MR: Well coffee, as long as you don’t have one of the four side effects of coffee, decreases your risk of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, liver and ovarian cancer, so coffee has a lot of benefits. Four side effects, headache, abnormal heart rhythms, gastric upset and anxiety, but if you don’t have one of those, the more coffee you have, the more it decreases your risk of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease, memory loss, liver cancer, and even some others such as ovarian cancer.
RM: Well coffees sum aligned, you know, what is it in coffee that ads these benefits?
MR: Well there are two things in coffee that add the benefits. It is caffeine and it is the polyphenols.
RM: Okay.
MR: The polyphenols, which other people call antioxidants but they don’t really work in our bodies as antioxidants,-
RM: Okay.
MR: -they work as polyphenols; those are the second highest amount we get from anything. You know, bananas are next high, coffee is American, blueberries and- for all the color and all the wonderfulness of blueberries, we don’t have them every day like we do coffee.
RM: It’s just ironic; that’s why I’m laughing.
MR: Those are quote the polyphenols that help decrease the aging effect.
RM: So it keeps you mentally sharp is what you’re saying to me.
MR: It does keep you mentally sharp. It will help you run to the bathroom enough too so that it’ll give you some exercise.
RM: And you’ll be sharp and aerobically fit.
MR: Right.
RM: So coffee. Anything else that might surprise me that I could use for anti-aging?
MR: Sure. There are a ton of things that would surprise you. So we already talked about flossing your teeth when we talked about inflammation, but flossing your teeth decreases inflammation and can keep you young. You already know about exercise, you know about aging fats and aging sugars and aging, if you will, carbohydrate if it isn’t a hundred percent whole grain. Some of the other things that help keep you young, one of the most important one now that we’re all talking about is vitamin D.
RM: Ah yes.
MR: So vitamin D, a thousand international units a day is what I prescribe to my patients if they’re otherwise normal because that decreases the risk of cancer, decreases the risk of type II diabetes, decreases immune dysfunction, even decreases flu and decreases cancer as well. Why does it decrease cancer? Because you need vitamin D to turn on your proofreader gene. Did you know you have a proofreader gene?
RM: No, I did not.
MR: So in every cell you have what’s called a P53 gene that reads the rest of your genes, and if there’s a typographical error it causes that cell to commit suicide. But what turns on that spellchecker, you know you do it on your computer, you can turn it on or off, but in the body it’s vitamin D.
