Are you thinking about your New Year’s resolutions – maybe to do with work, or sorting out your finances, or yes, health related?
The bad news is that sticking to those good intentions can be difficult, with study after study showing very few of us manage it.
But I have a really easy health-boosting resolution for you; not only is it cheap, but it can help prevent a whole range of illnesses, has benefits for your mental well-being and, crucially, is incredibly simple to incorporate into your everyday life.
And that is, to drink more coffee.
If exercise is the wonder drug everyone should take, then coffee is the elixir of life everyone should drink; caffeinated or not, it doesn’t matter because it’s the coffee itself that’s so good for you.
The problem is, it’s got a bad reputation because of previous poor science.
Observational studies from when I was a medical student linked coffee consumption with various conditions ranging from cancer to heart attacks and anxiety.
However, it turns out it wasn’t the coffee causing people’s ill health: 30 years ago drinking coffee was often associated with smoking, which was the real culprit – in other words, people had a coffee with their cigarette.
Coffee reduces your risk of having a heart attack or stroke (picture posed by model)
But the myth persisted – in my own case, I even pledged to give up coffee as one of my New Year’s resolutions in 2000. How wrong I was!
For the latest evidence, published in November in the journal Nature Microbiology, shows that coffee does wondrous things for our gut microbiome (the colony of microbes that live there).
In a review of studies looking at more than 100 different types of food and drink, coffee – both caffeinated and decaffeinated – came out top for producing the highest levels of good bacteria. In particular, coffee drinkers had eight times the amount of a ‘good’ bacterium called Lawsonibacter asaccharolyticus. When it breaks down food, it produces short chain fatty acids which help induce the death of damaged cells, the cells that are the precursor to cancer.
This backs up previous research that shows a link between coffee drinking and lower rates of bowel cancer – and higher rates of survival if you do have it. This includes a study from earlier this year in the International Journal of Cancer, which found that patients who drank four cups of coffee a day had a 32 per cent lower risk of their cancer returning (though there are no additional advantages in drinking more than this – in fact, the benefits were slightly reduced.)
Numerous other studies show the benefits of both decaffeinated and caffeinated black coffee (not the milky or sweet options with syrups) in reducing your risk of rectal, liver, kidney and womb cancers, too.
So what’s going on? While we don’t fully understood the mechanism, we do know that coffee is rich in plant compounds, in particular chlorogenic acids, which have strong antioxidant properties. Antioxidants stop the damaging effects of free radicals, harmful molecules produced by everything from our body processes to pollution and which directly damage cell DNA, leading to mutations that may cause cancer.
When you drink coffee you have higher levels of polyphenols and – the thinking is – less DNA damage.
We also know coffee contains compounds with anti-inflammatory effects, cafestol and kahweol. These normally help control the body’s response to injury but in excess can causes too much inflammation – and chronic inflammation leads to conditions such as arthritis, heart attacks and cancer.
This is true of decaf coffee too, but if you do choose caffeinated coffee, an added plus is that caffeine in its own right reduces inflammation and can calm down an overactive immune system. It can also induce older cells in the body to die off, which can stop cancers forming.
And it’s not just cancer – a 2014 review of studies published in the journal Diabetologia showed that the incidence of type 2 diabetes (caused by raised blood sugar levels) was reduced by 12 per cent for every two cups of caffeinated coffee and 11 per cent for every two cups of decaf coffee people consumed a day. Chlorogenic acids and other compounds are thought to improve the cells’ response to insulin, so they take up sugar from the blood.
Coffee reduces your risk of heart attacks, stroke and heart failure, too. People who drank two to three cups of coffee a day had a lower risk of cardiovascular disease and early death, according to research published in 2022 in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology. Crucially, the researchers took into account other factors that affect cardiovascular disease such as ethnicity, obesity, high blood pressure, diabetes and smoking status – this means we can be pretty sure any differences are due to the coffee.
All types of coffee – instant, ground or decaffeinated coffee – had this positive effect, with the greatest benefit seen in having two to three cups a day. And the best performing coffee was ground (reassuringly, the kind I have in my morning cafetiere or as an espresso) which led to a 27 per cent reduction in premature death. This is possibly because more of the beneficial compounds are lost when coffee is manufactured to make it instant or decaffeinated.
What surprised me most about the study was that caffeinated coffee also reduces the risks of heart rhythm problems such as atrial fibrillation (AF) – the biggest risk factor for stroke.
We know very high doses of caffeine can trigger AF because it over stimulates the sinoatrial node, a muscle that generates an electrical signal which controls your heart rate and rhythm.
And so the assumption was that even low doses could increase your risk and anyone with AF should avoid coffee altogether.
But the evidence shows that moderate coffee consumption (two to three cups daily ) is safe if you have AF and doesn’t increase your risk of developing it – ‘and can be enjoyed as a heart healthy behaviour’, the researchers said.
I used to think coffee was dangerous for people with high blood pressure. But while it can cause a small rise immediately after drinking it, over time modest consumption doesn’t increase your blood pressure.
Coffee – specifically chlorogenic acid – can also act as a natural Ozempic by simulating the release of the appetite-suppressing hormone GLP 1, as the drug does.
Coffee boosts your brain health, too; caffeine can increase levels of a chemical called cAMP that in turn increases the production of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a protein crucial for maintaining our memory.
It’s also great for sports performance: one cup can raise levels of cAMP, which also boosts how quickly our muscles contract.
Professor Rob Galloway says that as long as you drink three to four cups a day (caffeinated or decaf), ideally black and certainly without any sweet stuff, a coffee habit can only be a good thing
Studies have shown that coffee (especially caffeinated) has a whole range of beneficial effects on mood, alertness and cognition, with no evidence of increasing anxiety with moderate consumption.
Finally, it doesn’t make you dehydrated – the volume of fluids you drink counteracts the diuretic effect of caffeine.
There are some downsides of caffeinated coffee if it’s taken at the wrong time, or you have too much. It does make it harder to go to sleep, so I drink caffeinated coffee until lunchtime and decaf after that.
And caffeine in excess can be dangerous: I’ve seen people overdose on highly caffeinated energy drinks combined with caffeine supplements and caffeine chewing gums. They look like they’ve had a stroke because of the temporary damage to the parts of the brain involved in coordination.
In a nutshell: as long as you drink three to four cups a day (caffeinated or decaf), ideally black and certainly without any sweet stuff, a coffee habit can only be a good thing.
So here’s to a happy New Year – and guilt-free coffee drinking in 2025!Â
@drrobgalloway
