There is no shortage of interesting articles about the potential health benefits of drinking coffee. It’s quite difficult, however, to find verified facts. In today’s blog we try to unpick some of the detail around just one of the popular health claims – that drinking coffee is good for your heart health.
To put this discussion into context, and show how complex it is, here are just some of the claims that we have seen in print during the last few months:
- Coffee helps reduce heart disease
- Coffee helps increase sports performance
- Coffee can help with the management of type 2 diabetes
- Coffee helps you concentrate and improves cognitive ability
- Coffee can help slow the onset of dementia
- Coffee helps to delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease
- Coffee helps reduce blood pressure
It seems that if you read enough newspaper and online articles, you could end up believing that drinking coffee pretty much fixes everything! Hmm, maybe not, but we have researched some of the claims carefully, and there is definitive evidence of some benefits of drinking coffee – it’s not just hearsay and/or marketing spin.
We have been very careful to only look at really strong evidence from reputable sources to support the claims.
A common theme of information available from reputable sources such as the NHS is that it seems a little coffee is generally good, but drinking too much is generally bad. Experts seem to be agreed that one to three cups of coffee per day is good, and more than four coffees per day is too much. This is true whichever health claims we looked at – so not more then three medium or four small cups of coffee per day.
IS COFFEE GOOD FOR HEART HEALTH?
We looked at claims that drinking coffee is good for your heart health. We found plenty of good articles and studies that concluded that drinking half a cup of coffee or more, but not more than three cups, does give a measurable improvement in heart health.
Our conclusion is that coffee is good for your heart health.
Drink coffee, but don’t drink too much coffee.
There were several articles leading to similar conclusions, including a research paper from University Hospital of Southampton from research published in 2022:
https://research.uhs.nhs.uk/news/three-coffees-a-day-could-help-keep-the-doctor-away
In addition, we also looked at this well-balanced article from the British Heart Foundation which was more generally looking at caffeine (from any source) which concluded that coffee is good, and also highlighted additional benefits and some areas to be careful about regarding high blood pressure:
There are a couple of caveats worth highlighting, that were associated with all the research that we found:
Firstly, adding syrups, cow’s milk, sugar, cream to your coffee MAY impact your health in other, potentially negative ways such as increasing cholesterol.
Secondly, a special note about caffeine and pregnancy – if you are pregnant, please do see our blog about the important NHS guidance relating to caffeine and pregnancy – the suggestion is to limit caffeine to less than 200mg of caffeine per day, which means you would be wise to drink decaf coffee if you are expecting a baby.
