Health experts tend to go back and forth on whether or not caffeine is actually good for you, or how much you should ingest every day. No matter which side you land on, there’s no arguing that a cup of caffeine (in the form of coffee or any other liquid) has become a big part of many of our lives. And now, researchers say that caffeine could actually help with cellular aging.
According to a new paper published in Microbial Cell, caffeine may actually slow cellular aging by activating a primary energy-sensing pathway in your body called AMPK. The researchers involved in the new findings used fission yeast in lieu of human cells. When exposed to caffeine, they found that the AMPK activity in the yeast increased, allowing cells to better manage stress, repair their DNA, and even regulate their growth.
This research follows closely on the heels of additional dives into whether or not coffee is good for you. As one of our primary sources of daily caffeine, the benefits of coffee have long been debated among the health community. This new development is deeper, though, as it looks at caffeine as a whole. Considering how much scientists have worked to try to get age-reversing medication, finding something that can help slow cellular aging could be a dream come true for some scientists.
The key to how caffeine helps with cellular aging comes down to the switch that it interacts with. However, instead of interacting directly with the trigger, a growth regulator called TOR (Target of Rapamycin), caffeine only interacts with AMPK, which helps cells cope with lower energy. The effect that caffeine has on AMPK seems to influence how cells grow, as well as how they repair their DNA.
Each of the attributes that caffeine has an effect on is tied to both aging and disease, which is why caffeine has long been heralded as being beneficial for health and longevity, at least in controlled amounts. Future research that digs deeper into this connection could help us understand the role caffeine plays in cellular aging even more.
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