Chemopreventive molecules of coffee and beneficial metabolic effects

Among all the plant species examined, together with the food products that derive from it, coffee has a reputation that over the course of history has had a rather controversial evolution: some episodes are emblematic of the mistrust that, in the first decades of its diffusion in Europe and in the World, accompanied the drink. Coffee is obtained by infusing the powder obtained by grinding the toasted seeds of some species of tropical shrubs belonging to the genus Coffea, practiced through various techniques; although there are over 100 species, those used for food consumption are very few, and almost all of the market is aimed at only two of them: Coffea arabica and Coffea canephora, better known commercially (but improperly) with the name of Robusta. Today it can be said that the antioxidant activity of coffee, intended both as a vegetable and as a drink, has been known for some time and has been evaluated through different methods; various studies have shown that the high content of polyphenols in coffee plays an important role in its strong antioxidant action. Since 1997, the year in which the first works on this activity were presented, the concern about the potential risks related to coffee intake has rapidly diminished and a line of research has originated aimed at evaluating its therapeutic effects, especially chemopreventive, antidiabetic and anticarginogenic effects. It was immediately proposed that, at the head of the wide family of active polyphenolic compounds, there were chlorogenic acids, whose remarkable ability to prevent oxidative cell damage was immediately determined.