From protecting your heart to warding off Alzheimer’s and cancer, your daily caffeine hit is more powerful than you realise.
Professor Tim Spector, the King’s College London epidemiologist celebrated for his work on diet and the microbiome recently declared that "coffee is a healthy drink".
Adding: “There is more fibre in a cup of coffee than a glass of orange juice. Coffee also has more of the defence chemicals, polyphenols, which combined with fibre actually help to feed our gut microbes without any adverse sugar effects. So, we should be drinking more coffee (preferably black) – and if coffee isn’t right for you due to caffeine sensitivity, decaf, surprisingly, has a lot of the same benefits.”
Furthermore, Professor Clare Collins, an expert in nutrition and dietetics at the University of Newcastle in New South Wales, says: “For people who are always asking ‘what else can I do to try and be healthy’ or ‘I’m going on a health kick’, the one thing you want to keep doing is to continue to drink coffee.” Here's why:
Heart Protection: Scientists from the University of Colorado, who examined data on the diet and medical records of more than 15,000 people, found that, compared to people who didn’t drink coffee, for every extra cup of coffee drunk per week, there was a 7 percent drop in the risk of heart failure and an 8 percent reduction in stroke risk.
Cancer Prevention: Studies have found that some cancers, especially liver and womb cancer, are less common among coffee drinkers. There’s also some evidence that the drink may protect against mouth and skin cancers.
Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Prevention: Research has consistently shown that coffee seems to protect against developing Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. Scientists in Canada who studied this phenomenon suggested in a paper that this effect could be down to compounds called phenylindanes, which are produced when coffee beans are roasted.
Mood and Depression: The uplifting mental effects of caffeine are obvious to all those who enjoy a shot coffee. However, beyond these short-term changes, coffee seems to have long-lasting mental health effects. One review found that there was a 24 percent lower risk of depression among the biggest coffee drinkers, who were downing four-and-a-half cups a day, compared to those who had less than one cup per day. This is thought to be down to the caffeine in coffee increasing the expression of neurotransmitters in the brain, such as the “happy hormone” dopamine.
Weight Management: As well as being low in calories, coffee may also boost the body’s calorie-burning capabilities by activating brown fat. Scientists at the University of Nottingham studied brown fat in lab tests and results showed that coffee activates it, which could ultimately help with weight loss.
Reduced Risk of Type 2 Diabetes: Maintaining a healthy weight, exercising and following a healthy diet are the evidence-backed ways of reducing the risk of Type 2 diabetes. However, studies suggest that habitually drinking coffee could protect against the condition. A review by Harvard University researchers, which looked at 28 prior studies, found that people who drank one cup daily were 8 percent less likely to develop Type 2 diabetes, compared to non-coffee drinkers. The benefits increased with every cup of coffee consumed, up to a 33 per cent lower risk among those who drank six cups a day.
And last, but by no means least...
Longer Life Expectancy: Researchers in Australia, who monitored the health and coffee-drinking habits of around 450,000 people for more than a decade, reported that people who drank two to three cups of ground coffee a day were up to 27 percent less likely to die early.
In further good news, if you don’t enjoy the bitter taste of black coffee, it doesn’t actually matter if you add a drop of milk – the health benefits will be the same. “Most of the research studies are testing black coffee and most are done in the United States where black coffee drinking is more common,” says Prof Collins. “But there’s no reason to believe that the results would be appreciably different if you’re adding a bit of milk to your coffee.”