Coffee has long carried an unusual reputation in nutrition research. It is a daily habit, not a medicine, yet study after study has tied it to longer life and lower risk of diseases that often come with aging. Now a team at Texas A&M University says it may have found part of the biological machinery behind that pattern. In research published in Nutrients, scientists at the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences traced several coffee compounds to a receptor called NR4A1, a protein involved in how the body responds to stress, inflammation and tissue damage. Their work offers one of the clearest explanations yet for how coffee might help protect the body, at least in part. “Coffee has well-known health-promoting properties,” said Dr. Stephen Safe, distinguished professor and Sid Kyle Endowed Chair in Veterinary Toxicology in the university’s Department of Veterinary Physiology and Pharmacology. “What we’ve shown is that some of those effects may be linked to how coffee compounds interact with this receptor, which is involved in protecting the body from …