Habitual coffee intake shapes the microbiome, modifies physiology and cognition

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-71264-8

80•scubakid•2h ago

Comments

neya•1h ago

The only good thing that keeps me from collapsing into a state of limbo is coffee and now, even that's bad (seems more like a mixed bag, but still)? Sigh.

bee_rider•1h ago

There have been positive and negative reports for a long long time. If coffee was going to kill us, I’d certainly have died in school!

kulahan•1h ago

Coffee in general is unreasonably healthy as a beverage. The overwhelming majority of science agrees it’s a quality health drink.

anon84873628•32m ago

Don't fret. You're allowed to enjoy things that aren't part of the scientific reductionist longevity influencer lifestyle fad :)

antonvs•18m ago

Nitpick: What you’re referring to is not scientific.

cyberpunk•29m ago

Maybe I have some neurological issue or something but whenever I quit coffee I find it extremely difficult to maintain any kind of motivation to sit in an open plan office and code. Coffee makes me a worker bee, I can understand why employers give it away for free.

So, the coffee stays for now.

getnormality•1h ago

Coffee modifies physiology and cognition? You're telling me this for the first time.

ButlerianJihad•1h ago

I was so surprised at this headline that I nearly leapt out of my chair!

jonplackett•8m ago

But it says it’s the same for decaf. That is more interesting

triage8004•1h ago

Humans known since 45 minutes after first drink

alecco•1h ago

The paper is about previously unknown ways coffee affects the body.

reedf1•1h ago

At least subjectively, coffee seems to help my memory. But maybe that's why I started drinking coffee?

I would probably drop coffee it was proven to have negative effects on memory.

bboozzoo•1h ago

> But maybe that's why I started drinking coffee?

you don't remember why, do you?

6LLvveMx2koXfwn•1h ago

"These findings reveal previously unrecognised effects of coffee on the microbiota–gut–brain axis, suggesting that microbiome profiles could potentially predict coffee consumption patterns", or, perhaps, just ask the patient?

raincole•1h ago

Could you elaborate on how to interpret your comment without it leading to anti-intellectualism?

6LLvveMx2koXfwn•1h ago

It was a joke

colechristensen•1h ago

You are missing the point.

If you can predict someone's coffee intake based on testing of their microbiome then you've proven that coffee intake has predictable effects on the microbiome.

The important part isn't predicting coffee use, it's just the proof that there's you can predict and perhaps control in the opposite direction leading to more research.

wjnc•1h ago

I have not much followed the science of gut microbiome and psychology. Is this really going where this article is pointing? That we can tease out causation in foods and habits via gut microbiome towards behavior and psychology? Pretty rad.

colechristensen•1h ago

Yeah there's nontrivial evidence that among other things, the complex community living inside you manipulates your brain.

ButlerianJihad•1h ago

My psychiatrists agree that “hallucination” (in lay terms: “hearing voices” or “seeing things”) only refers to things that aren’t real.

chneu•1h ago

There's a decent amount of research going into the hormones that our GI biome produce and how it affects us. Our body has a few different biomes and they all seem to play somewhat important roles.

poly2it•1h ago

> ... reintroduction triggered acute microbiome changes independent of caffeine.

This sounds interesting. I've never really considered the constituents of coffee other than caffeine and what unique effects they may bring.

I wonder if I would experience behavioral effects if I replaced my coffee intake with caffeinated non-coffee drinks or pills?

kulahan•1h ago

Studies seem to indicate that coffee is at least as healthy, if not healthier than tea, and I have not heard this about caffeine specifically (aka the same effects coming from pills or energy drinks).

One fun fact: we still haven’t figured out why coffee makes us poop. We’ve studied every chemical in there and can’t seem to find a link, but the association is uh… well-known.

pinkmuffinere•1h ago

I’m super interested in this sort of study! However, it looks like n=62 here, which I think weakens the results —they’re probably just useful as suggestions of possible effects. Also, any food is expected to have similar effects on the microbiome. They didn’t test caffeine in isolation. In some ways that’s better (I don’t consume caffeine in isolation), but in some ways that’s less useful (it’s possible you get similar results from many random vegetables)

sixtyj•1h ago

In 1995, NASA did spiders experiment. Caffeine is a siginificant impulsivity trigger. :)

https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/nasa-spiders-drugs-experime...

jayd16•18m ago

Nice web, Mr. Crack spider.

bhaney•56m ago

> They didn’t test caffeine in isolation

But they did test both caffeinated and uncaffeinated coffee, and found the same effects in both, indicating that the effect is caused by something in coffee other than the caffeine

krige•50m ago

Doesn't decaf also contain caffeine, just a lot less of it?

anon84873628•24m ago

Typical extraction yield is 18-20%. For a 20g dose that's 4g of material consumed, or about 30 individual beans.

I wonder if you could find similar effects with 4g or broccoli sprouts, or garlic, or ginger, or cumin seed, shiitake mushroom, seaweed, soursop leaf, or...

satvikpendem•1h ago

What's cool is this effect exists even in decaf coffee, as someone who primarily drinks decaf black, for flavor and for a good night's rest as I'm sensitive to caffeine.

Kelteseth•6m ago

What kind of decaf coffee do you drink? There are differences between the cheap chemical Methylene way to create decaf coffee and the expensive co2 way to get rid of the caffeine.

https://cleanlabelproject.org/wp-content/uploads/CLP-Decaf-C...

testemailfordg2•43m ago

Funded by the Institute for Scientific Information on Coffee (ISIC) — an industry body — which is a notable conflict of interest the authors disclose but don't extensively discuss

rapidaneurism•25m ago

It does not sound like an outcome that big coffee paid for it to be so:

Behaviourally, coffee drinkers exhibited greater impulsivity and emotional reactivity, whereas non-coffee drinkers demonstrated better memory performance.

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Habitual coffee intake shapes the microbiome, modifies physiology and cognition

Comments

DeepSeek v4

Why I Write (1946)

GPT-5.5

An update on recent Claude Code quality reports

Bitwarden CLI compromised in ongoing Checkmarx supply chain campaign

US special forces soldier arrested after allegedly winning $400k on Maduro raid

Familiarity is the enemy: On why Enterprise systems have failed for 60 years

Habitual coffee intake shapes the microbiome, modifies physiology and cognition

Meta tells staff it will cut 10% of jobs

Show HN: Tolaria – Open-source macOS app to manage Markdown knowledge bases

MeshCore development team splits over trademark dispute and AI-generated code

Using the internet like it's 1999

TorchTPU: Running PyTorch Natively on TPUs at Google Scale

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Your hex editor should color-code bytes

UK Biobank health data keeps ending up on GitHub

Show HN: Agent Vault – Open-source credential proxy and vault for agents

My phone replaced a brass plug

A quick look at Mythos run on Firefox: too much hype?

Incident with multple GitHub services

Show HN: Honker – Postgres NOTIFY/LISTEN Semantics for SQLite

A programmable watch you can actually wear

Used La Marzocco machines are coveted by cafe owners and collectors

Astronomers find the edge of the Milky Way

Alberta startup sells no-tech tractors for half price

Writing a C Compiler, in Zig (2025)

I am building a cloud

French government agency confirms breach as hacker offers to sell data

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