Drink Coffee to Prevent Cancer
by Amy Bott
Article Summary
The author of “Daily coffee, even decaf, may protect against colorectal cancer” is Honor Whiteman. This article is from the website www.medicalnewstoday.com. This article was published on Friday April 1, 2016. According to this article a person’s risk of getting colon and rectal cancers can be halved with more than 2.5 coffee servings a day. A study was conducted in Israel with participants who both drank coffee and did not drink coffee. Participants were given a questionnaire asking their daily intake of espresso, caffeinated coffee, decaffeinated coffee, and other drinks. Participant’s family history of cancer, diet, physical activity, and other factors that could give them a risk of colorectal cancer were also questioned. With those questionnaires, researchers found that drinking one to two servings of coffee daily would reduce the risk of colon and rectal cancers by 26 % compared to participants who drank less coffee. Researchers also found that the risk of getting colorectal cancer keeps decreasing with the more coffee you drink. Researchers also found that these findings are still accurate with any type of coffee, even decaffeinated. Researchers also explored what compounds in coffee contribute to the reduced risk other than caffeine.
Article Critique
According to the Medical News Today website (2016), information about Honor Whiteman only contains about 2-3 sentences. In those few sentences, it talks about her past working in a consumer and financial trade publication. Financial trades and publications do not have much to do with news in the medicine and nutrition field. This lessens her reliability as a writer for a medical article, because she is used to writing about subjects like finance and consumerism, which do not have much to do with coffee reducing your causes of cancer. Also, the source of this article is from a “.com.” The “.com” domain is not reliable because it can be purchased by any one, where as “.edu” or “.gov” domains can only be purchased by universities or the government, reliable organizations. Advertisements are all over the article when the source is opened. This reduces the reliability because you feel as though they are trying to sell you things instead of provide you with content in the article, another reason the “.com” domain is not reliable. In addition, this source is not very credible because it does not include names of the researchers or any links to the actual research study. It shows links to other articles that talk about coffee decreasing effects of cancer, but none of the author’s resources link to more data about the study that was done and talked about in the article. Although this is a very hopeful topic, there are many different precautions to take to ensure the information being given is reliable.
Works Cited
Honor Whiteman. (n.d.). Retrieved April 04, 2016, from http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/authors/honor-whiteman
Whiteman, H. (2016, April 1). Daily coffee, even decaf, may protect against colorectal cancer. Retrieved April 04, 2016, from http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/308574.php
"Honor Whiteman