According to a study published in the Journal of Internal Medicine, coffee is able to alter metabolism in several ways, including affecting the steroid pathway.
In the study, researchers at Northwestern University discovered that coffee can also alter many other metabolites in the blood than was previously known.
How does coffee affect the metabolism?
The researchers conducted their study in Finland over a period of three months. In the study, 47 participants were asked to refrain from taking coffee for a month. After that time, they were then asked to drink four cups of coffee a day for the second month and eight cups a day for the third month.
During each step, blood was collected from the participants for analysis. They then used advanced profiling strategies to examine more than 800 metabolites in the collected blood. Advanced technology has also been used to measure hundreds of metabolites in human blood samples.
They found that coffee consumption, especially with eight cups a day, resulted in a reduction in endocannabinoid metabolites. Metabolites are chemicals in the blood that change after you have eaten a food or drunk a drink.
The endocannabinoid metabolic pathway plays a role in the regulation of people's stress response. In addition, some endocannabinoids decrease when a person experiences chronic stress.
According to the results of the researchers, some metabolites related to the androsteroid system increased in subjects after they consumed four to eight cups of coffee each day. This suggests that coffee may play a role in the excretion or elimination of steroids.
The steroid pathway is a home for some diseases, including cancers. Thus, coffee can also have an effect on these diseases.
"The increased coffee consumption during the two months of the test may have created enough stress to trigger a decrease in metabolites in this system," said Marilyn Cornelis, lead author of the study and adjunct professor at Feinberg School. of Medicine at Northwestern University.
"It could be the adaptation of our body to try to bring stress levels back to balance," she added.