Is Coffee Healthy For You?

Nutritional advice just seems so variable, swinging wildly from one set of ideas to another. And there’s no shortage of examples: from eggs to no eggs (and back again), zero calorie drinks to none (it’s those artificial sweeteners), eat 3 square meals/6 mini-meals, wine is bad/is great/is kinda good, good carbs/bad carbs, good fats/bad fats, eat bread with your meal and oh my gosh whatever you do don’t eat the bread.

The good news is that our favorite morning picker upper has pretty much gained consensus in the scientific world.

If you need something to help you get to sleep at night, you can sift through this review article, but the bottom line is that multiple studies all confirm each other: plain black coffee is a super health food.

From the summary:

Coffee … exerts potent effects on long-term human health. Recently, a plethora of studies have been published focusing on health outcomes associated with coffee intake.

An inverse association between coffee consumption and all-cause mortality has been seen consistently in large prospective studies. 

Science-to-English Dictionary: the “inverse association” means that, as coffee consumption goes up death from any cause goes down.

Habitual coffee consumption is also associated with lower risks for cardiovascular (CV) death and a variety of adverse CV outcomes, including coronary heart disease (CHD), congestive heart failure (HF), and stroke; coffee’s effects on arrhythmias and hypertension are neutral.

Science-to-English Dictionary: it’s good for your heart.

Coffee consumption is associated with improvements in some CV risk factors, including type 2 diabetes (T2D), depression, and obesity. Chronic coffee consumption also appears to protect against some neurodegenerative diseases, and is associated with improved asthma control, and lower risks for liver disease and cancer.

Science-to-English Dictionary: coffee is associated with better health, from brain to belly, and even diabetes.

Habitual intake of 3 to 4 cups of coffee appears to be safe and is associated with the most robust beneficial effects. 

Science-to-English Dictionary: if you can keep it to coffee coffee, and not the milkshake coffee double pump super whip macchiato peppermint pumpkin spice latte, a whopping 3-4 cups per day is associated with that raft-load of health benefits.