Dark Coffee Can Reduce The Risk Of Alzheimer's & Parkinson's Diseases, A New Study Showed

Your daily coffeeshop stop might have this health benefit. A new study published in Frontiers in Neuroscience suggests that drinking coffee might reduce your risk of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's Disease, USA TODAY carryforwards. And the darker the roast, the better, because it's not necessarily the caffeine that keeps your brain healthy. The researchers think it is actually the phenylindanes – which are found in higher quantities in darker roast coffees – that are the key to a healthy brain. That's because phenylindans are known to prevent common protein fragments to Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, says MindBodyGreen.

Donald Weaver, co-director of the Krembil Brain Institute and one of the study's authors, said in a statement. "But we wanted to investigate why they are involved and how they can impact age-related cognitive decline."

Phenylindanes are the only compound investigated in the study that keep the protein fragments common to Alzheimer's and Parkinson's from clumping, according to the release of the study. Roasting coffee beans leads to a higher yield of phenylindans, so dark roast coffee appears to have a greater protective effect.

"It's the first time anybody's investigated how phenylindans interact with the proteins that are responsible for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's," Ross Mancini, another author of the study, was quoted as saying in the press release. "The next step would be to investigate how they're doing and they're going to have a breakthrough in the bloodstream."

But this is not the first study of the effects of coffee and caffeine on neurological conditions like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's Disease. In January 2018, a study was published in the journal Neurology that found a decaffeinated coffee offered no protective benefits to Parkinson's patients, findings that are in opposition to this new study. The researchers concluded that it was the caffeine, which is not available, that provided pharmacological benefits, according to the study, while the new research found the opposite.

Americans consumed an estimated 3.4 billion pounds of coffee last year, according to Harvard Health, and overall studies show drinking coffee in moderation. Earlier this year, a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine found that coffee drinkers actually live longer than non-coffee drinkers, even if they drink a lot of it. Although the caffeine is so good that it's your thing, it's your diabetes, type 2 diabetes, dementia, and taste, says Harvard Health.

As for this latest study, the researchers said that they need to know more about how to protect your brain.

"What this study does is take the epidemiological evidence and try to refine it and to demonstrate that it is beneficial to warding off cognitive decline," Weaver was quoted as saying. "It's interesting but we are suggesting that coffee is a cure? Absolutely not. "