Coffee is good for you—unless it’s not!

The good news is that there’s a lot of research that links drinking coffee with health benefits, including lower risk of cancer, Parkinson’s disease, obesity, diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and heart disease.  I covered that research in detail in a recent podcast.

Here’s the bad news: while coffee is undoubtedly beneficial for some people, it may be harmful for others.

I talked about some of the factors, including sleep, stress, and intolerance to proteins in coffee beans, that determine individual response to coffee in another podcast a while back.

But there’s another important factor to consider: genotype.

Coffee is the primary source of caffeine for Americans. Caffeine is metabolized by an enzyme in the liver that is encoded for by the CYP1A2 gene. Unfortunately, about 50 percent of the population has a variant in the CYP1A2 gene that leads to slow processing of caffeine.

Source: Coffee is good for you—unless it’s not!