Your grandparents are sometimes confused by all the contradictory scientific cla
ID: 3316976 • Letter: Y
Question
Your grandparents are sometimes confused by all the contradictory scientific claims they see in the news. Recently, they read an article in The Washington Post entitled "What's real and what's myth when it comes to caffeine?" The article appears to offer some scientifically substantiated advice about caffeine consumption. After having read the article, your grandmother is convinced both she and your grandfather are consuming too much caffeine. Your grandfather disagrees with her. They remember you are taking a statistics class, so they ask you for help in interpreting the article. The Washington Post article references a number of other more scientific studies and reports. One of them appears in the Food and Chemical Toxicology Journal entitled "Beverage caffeine intakes in the U.S.". You don't have the time to understand all of the details in this scientific report, but you believe a review of it will help you form your answer for your grandparents. Using both The Washington Post article and the Food and Chemical Toxicology scientific study it references, write a nice email response for your grandparents. Your email response should guide your grandparents as to the kinds of questions they need to ask before they can determine whether or not they are consuming "too much" caffeine. It should reference a few details of the scientific study: the research questions), perhaps a basic description of the study design, what the study was measuring (explanatory variables, response variables, any confounding variables). You may need to explain the meaning of some of these terms. Help your grandparents see how their consumption habits compare with those of the sample the scientific study draws upon. Finally, include in your email your argument about if your grandparents should trust the claims made by The Washington Post and how they should generally interpret the results. Items to keep in mind: When we read your drafted email, we will play the role of your grandparents with minimal statistical literacy who are trying to understand the complexity of the statistics underlying scientific claims. Cite your external references (both the news article and study as well as any additional references) using MLA format. These resources can be downloaded from D2L. Since you are explaining this to your grandparents, you should take care to carefully edit and proofread your email. This should be an email of between 350-500 words.Explanation / Answer
Hi,
You wrote to me earlier about your concerns about coffee consumption and whether you were consuming more coffee than you should. I went through the Washington Post article you sent and also another scientific article wherein they measured the average coffee consumption across the US.
The important thing to realize right at the start is anything if consumed in excess might be harmful and that includes water, food etc. So, obviously coffee too has its pros and cons. The main idea is to get a balance in its consumption. The scientific article I mentioned earlier [1], undertook a major study just to figure out how much coffee do we Americans regularly consume. Since nobody can ask everybody, so they selected volunteers in a random fashion to avoid getting biased on sex, age, race or state where they come from. If this is not done randomly and say the majority of volunteers come from Alaska where it’s quite cold and people might drink more coffee, then instead of saying that Alaskans drink more coffee we might misattribute this high number to the whole country. With this random volunteer selection programme under the Beverage Consumption Panel, they collected the drinking habits of 37,062 consumers (aged > 2 years) in a 7-day period in an online diary format. What they found was the majority of people drank at least one caffeinated drink per day. And the highest caffeine consumers were in the age groups of 50-64. So, I do think if these results are understood properly then older aged people (>50) consume coffee at a higher rate than the rest of ages.
So, though what seems that both you and grandpa do consume larger doses of coffee than say me, the more important question is – so what? What are the health benefits or downsides of consuming larger doses of coffee? More importantly as the article in WaPo says that what else is in the cup – cream, 5% fat milk, 2-3 spoons of sugar etc.? Because more than coffee alone it’s the additional ingredients which might cause more harm. Excess consumption of sugar [2] has been known as the main factor behind weight gain, chronic disease risk like diabetes, heart disease etc. So, if you both cut back on sugar, cream in your coffee then you won’t be at risk of getting other chronic diseases. Now comes the coffee itself, so how many cups do you guys have regularly -2,5, 10, 20? Also, are you getting regular sleep for 6-8 hours? If you consume 5-10 cups of coffee per day and are not getting sleep then it's obvious to cut back some consumption. Also, as the article says, coffee shouldn’t be taken a few hours before bed, as it would interfere with your sleep. In regards to rest of the benefits say weight reduction, lesser chance of getting type 2 diabetes etc, should be taken with a pinch of salt. As the article itself says, there aren’t many scientific studies which have studied the links between coffee consumption and those miracle benefits, so we too should take the positive spin on coffee cautiously.
To conclude, I would just ask you both to limit to 4-5 cups of coffee (at the max) per day, not take any coffee before 4-5 hours of sleep and also not add any fatty/sugary additives in it. If you guys practice this, along with eating healthy food and going for a brisk walk in the park 4-5 days a week then you both should be fit as a fiddle.
Your’s loving grandchild,
ABC
References:
1). Mitchell, Diane C., et al. “Beverage Caffeine Intakes in the U.S.” Food and Chemical Toxicology, vol. 63, Elsevier BV, Jan. 2014, pp. 136–142. Crossref, doi:10.1016/j.fct.2013.10.042.
2). Rippe, James, and Theodore Angelopoulos. “Relationship between Added Sugars Consumption and Chronic Disease Risk Factors: Current Understanding.” Nutrients, vol. 8, no. 11, MDPI AG, Nov. 2016, p. 697. Crossref, doi:10.3390/nu8110697.
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