No less than 1000 volatile compounds are generated during the roasting process, and between 25 and 35 are responsible for the coffee aroma (Mestdagh et al. These diversified compounds include chemical elements, amino acids, polyphenols, acids, diterpenes, melanoidins, lipids and sugars (Fig. Accessed October 2015).Ī cup of coffee is a complex mixture of several hundred molecules whose concentration and composition depend on many parameters: Water is the most abundant molecule in a cup of coffee and plays the role of solvent in the extraction of the compounds present in coffee. With this popularity, coffee has become the first cash crop in the world and the second most traded commodity after oil, and its price is reevaluated every day (International Coffee Organization. With an estimated consumption of more than two billion cups per day, coffee has become the most widely drunk beverage in the world after water.
robusta) in the tropical regions of the world, and over 546,000 tons were exported by more than 48 coffee-producing countries in August 2015 (International Coffee Organization. Today, coffee is produced mainly by two species of Coffea ( C. After a few minutes in the fire, the coffee beans released a pleasant aroma that intrigued the monk, who decided to remove the seeds from the fire, grind and immerse them in water to preserve their stimulating properties to help monks stay awake during their long nightly sessions of prayers (Bond 2011). Surprised by the power of these berries, he brought them to a monk who, frightened of their effect and thinking that these berries were Devil’s fruits, threw the berries into the fire. 2013), which were recently investigated for their chemopreventive and anticancer properties.Īccording to a legend, Kaldi, a goat herder living in Abyssinia or current-day Northern Ethiopia discovered coffee when he noticed the excited nature of his goats after they had consumed the red berries that had fallen from a shrub. 2014) and fungal secondary metabolites embellicines (Ebrahim et al. Among the vast natural chemical library, we can note isolated plant substances, such as curcumin (Teiten et al. These compounds act on a number of therapeutic targets, including processes involved in cancer development and progression (Gaascht et al. Used empirically in traditional medicine for thousands of years without fully knowing their mechanisms of action, natural products from marine or terrestrial organisms feature a wide variability of chemical structures that modulate a wide range of biological effects (Cerella et al. These different hallmarks of cancer are (1) sustaining proliferative signaling, (2) evading growth suppressors, (3) reprogramming energy metabolism, (4) inducing angiogenesis, (5) activating invasion and metastasis, (6) enabling replicative immortality, (7) evading immune destruction, (8) resisting cell death and the two enabling characteristics that constitute the cornerstone of carcinogenesis: (9) genome instability that provide mutations and (10) inflammation that results in signaling molecules and growth factors (Hanahan and Weinberg 2011).
In 2011, Hanahan and Weinberg proposed a model that suggests that the slow transformation of a normal cell into a cancer cells requires ten cellular physiological rearrangements. Carcinogenesis is a slow process that requires several years and occurs in different stages and can be compared to a Darwinian evolution process, where each mutation gives an advantage to the new mutated protein (Heng et al. 2013).Ĭancer is a complex and evolving disease that may have endogenous (genetic) or exogenous (environment) origins and which is triggered by the accumulation of mutations, leading to the transformation of a healthy normal cell into a cancer cell. However, cancer is a preventable disease, and between 25 and 40 % of cancer cases are estimated to be directly related to an unhealthy lifestyle and living in a polluted environment (White et al. In Europe, more than 1.3 million people are estimated to die of cancer in 2015 (Malvezzi et al. The figures recently released by the World Health Organization (WHO) reveal that 14.1 million new cancer cases and 8.2 million cancer-related deaths occurred in 2012 (GLOBOCAN 2012. Cancer is currently a major public health problem, and the physical or chemical tools used to fight against this frequently fatal disease remain few and, too often, ineffective.