campusreview.com.au
NEWS
Rise and grind
USQ’s promising link between
spent coffee and weight loss.
By Wade Zaglas
If you’re anything like me, your
self‐isolation period has involved many
trips to the fridge and not as much
exercise as you should have done.
Luckily, however, scientists at the
University of Southern Queensland have
discovered that a spoonful of coffee
grounds “could help your waistline
go down”.
The USQ researchers investigated the
properties of used coffee grounds, also
known as ‘spent’ coffee, to “uncover its
potential as a functional food – a food
that can prevent or reverse disease”.
Led by Professor Lindsay Brown, a
USQ biomedical scientist, the research
project involved male rats being fed a
high-carb, high-fat diet for four months,
supplemented with 5 per cent spent coffee
during the last eight weeks of the study.
“We found that those on the highcarbohydrate,
high-fat diet developed
metabolic syndrome, including abdominal
obesity, impaired glucose tolerance
and cardiovascular and liver damage,”
Brown said.
“When spent coffee grounds were
introduced to their diet, however, we saw
that body weight, abdominal fat, total body
fat mass, [and] systolic blood pressure was
reduced along with improved glucose
tolerance and structure and function of the
heart and liver.
“We also noted changes in gut microbiota
that correlated with the reduction in obesity
and improvement in glucose tolerance and
systolic blood pressure.”
Brown said the results showed that
a ‘coffee grounds’ intervention may be
useful for managing obesity and metabolic
syndrome by altering the gut microbiota.
“Our study was lucky enough to receive
the coffee grounds from the Refectory
at USQ’s Toowoomba campus, but if you
make your own coffee each morning, then
collect the grounds, dry it in the oven at 60
degrees for an hour or two, and simply add
a spoonful to your muffin mix or bread mix,”
he said.
“It’s not something that you’re going
to notice an overnight change by doing,
however it’s likely to decrease obesity and
improve your blood pressure too. Aside
from the potential health benefits though,
it’s great to have found value in food waste.
“Despite there being very little literature
on spent coffee, we do know that in
Sydney alone more than 3000 tonnes
of coffee waste is produced every
year, so it’s exciting to think about the
impact diverting that waste away from
landfill could have while also assisting
with healthier lifestyle choices.”
According to the university’s functional
foods website, more than two-thirds of
the Australian population will be classified
as overweight or obese in 10 years.
Chronic lifestyle conditions such as
obesity, heart disease, type 2 diabetes,
inflammatory bowel disease, kidney
damage and arthritis are growing at an
exponential rate, and there is an urgency
to find viable and sustainable solutions.
According to Brown, the way the public
views the role of food in relation to health
and overcoming obesity needs to change.
In related research, USQ and
other institutes are poised to begin
human trials on the Queen Garnet
plum in the elderly population.
Recent tests have shown that feeding
the plum’s juice to overweight rats helped
them return to a healthier body weight.
Damage to the rats’ livers and
hearts was also reversed, “due to the
exceptionally high level of anthocyanin –
a chemical compound with exceptional
anti-inflammatory effect”. ■
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