Filtered-coffee drinkers look younger than instant-coffee drinkers, new research says

Inflammation may partly explain instant coffee's aging link. Espresso drinkers are SOL.

Two cups of life-giving coffee: Which is brewed, which is instant?

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Summary: A new scientific analysis of 49,000 British adults suggests for the first time that filtered-coffee drinkers tended to look biologically younger than non-coffee drinkers, and that instant coffee drinkers look biologically older. The research also indicated the more filtered-coffee drinkers drank, the stronger the anti-aging effect. Researchers compared coffee habits—instant, filtered, or other—against three lab-based measures of how well people’s bodies were aging. These measures were taken only once, when participants enrolled. Two of these measures were overall "body age" scores, drawing on batches of routine health readings (blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar, inflammation and markers of kidney, liver and lung function) into a single estimate of whether a person's body looked older or younger than their actual age. The third measure looked at the length of participants’ telomeres—the protective caps on the ends of DNA strands inside white blood cells, which grow shorter as cells age. The human data came from the U.K. Biobank, a research database of more than 500,000 U.K. volunteers recruited between 2006 and 2010. The researchers adjusted for income, education, smoking, weight, and health; the filtered-coffee result holds up well, while the instant-coffee result is weak and could be explained by factors that weren’t measured.

Insight: Instant coffee is brewed coffee dried into soluble crystals, and some researchers classify it as an ultra-processed food, though that label is disputed. That extra processing is the obvious place to look for a chemical explanation of why instant coffee drinkers may look older, but the paper doesn’t go there. Instead, it says filtered coffee may carry more of coffee's main antioxidants—chlorogenic acids—though the authors borrow that claim from other research rather than measuring it in their own participants. Paper filters trap cholesterol-raising oils called diterpenes (which espresso, brewed through metal filters, sadly does not), though instant coffee is low in those, too, so diterpenes can't explain why instant would be worse for you. The one mechanism the researchers did find in their own data was inflammation: a blood marker called GlycA accounted for roughly a third of instant coffee's statistical link to faster aging. But because everything was measured at a single point in time, even that can't tell us whether the inflammation came before the aging or after.

Context: This appears to be the first study to test how coffee brewing method, rather than coffee overall, tracks with biological aging, which makes it novel but also hardly conclusive. As a one-time snapshot, it shows only an association between drinking a certain type of coffee brew and biological aging, not a causal connection. Participants reported their own coffee intake. They were almost entirely white, so the findings may not extend to other populations. Earlier research has raised more questions than it answered. One genetic analysis in 2023 tied instant coffee to shorter telomeres, for example, while other work from 2021 found coffee broadly protective. This paper doesn't settle those questions.

Takeaways:

• Filtered coffee brewed through a paper or metal filter (drip, pour-over) showed the clearest and most durable link to a younger biological age, and the effect climbed with every cup.

• Instant coffee’s “ages you faster” inference in this paper is not a strong one. A single unmeasured factor could wipe it out, so there’s little reason to abandon Folger’s Crystals over this … if Folger’s crystals is really your thing.

• Food scientists disagree whether instant coffee qualifies as an ultra-processed food vs. just a processed food. But if it melts in hot water, is it really coffee?

• If you’re an espresso-coffee drinker, you’re not getting much useful data from this work. You’re still getting coffee's documented health benefits while taking on a modest cholesterol bump from the unfiltered diterpenes. If you want espresso's cholesterol load minimized, you can always pour it through a paper filter.

• If you want to hedge your instant-coffee bet, check out what this fellow suggests.

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