There was some traction from a recent study out of Tel Aviv. that suggested that in yeast organisms, caffeine and heat make the telomeres shorten and alcohol and vinegar make them lengthen. Here is the actual study:  http://tinyurl.com/mab7rcr But here is sensationalized, ridiculous headline: http://tinyurl.com/mzovvly Is this truly useful information for our lives?  Probably not.  But it is a fun headline and people can ‘get their head around it.’  But that was the same “French Paradox” that let to fiasco of Resveratrol. People looked at one thing (lower cardiac disease in the French) and another thing (Red Wine) and then a third thing (trace amounts of resveratrol) and then a fourth thing (some obscure chemical pathway) and an entire industry was born.  I certainly hope this story about beer dies a quick death because the whole resveratrol thing was a huge distraction and a disease in search of a cure, in my opinion.   So let’s now I introduce the concept of causation vs. confounding.   Let’s assume that smoking was related to higher risk of heart disease.  If people also smoke cigarettes with coffee, then the coffee could be associated with heart disease but not directly causing it. That is called statistical confounding and so to establish causation we need other things such as theory, experiment, cohort, trials, plausibility, the proper temporal sequencing, proportionality etc.   So what is the point of all this?  Association is not causation because of confounding.  One might think that firemen are causing fires because they are often found at the scene of burning fires. But that doesn’t take into account theory (why would firemen set fires?), experiment (set a fire in a place where no firemen exist), cohort (how many fires are NOT associated with firemen), and temporality (do firemen always come AFTER the fires are discovered rather than before?)   When it comes to my stem cell/telomere theory of aging and disease, we find something that fulfills all criteria of causation.  Check out my book, “Telomere Timebombs”   to understand how this octagon explains that telomere erosion is not mere statistical association and confounding but rather the root cause itself.