How Healthy Is Coffee for You, Really? Experts Helped Me Realize My Coffee "Vice" Isn't So Bad
A couple years after I landed my first real job, I got my first coffee maker and started drinking my morning cup just as God intended it; that is, just as my mom, the only coffee drinker in my house growing up, drinks hers—roughly two parts coffee to one part Coffee mate. A drink the color of a Werther’s Original and redolent of cotton candy. It took longer than it should have for me to realize this wasn’t healthy. One summer my mom famously took her bottle of amaretto non-dairy creamer on a road trip, left it in the car day and night in the kinds of temperatures that suffocate small children, and it never spoiled. That was my wake-up call. I transitioned from Coffee mate to real cream and real sugar. Then, on a friend’s tip, to maple syrup. In time, I started drinking my coffee black.
Soon enough—confident that without the sugar and fat, my coffee habit was unquestionably healthy—I started drinking a lot of it. Until recently, during a stretch of working from home in which my mornings required whole pots of coffee (and sometimes another to-go cup in the afternoon), I started to wonder if maybe it wasn’t.
Because so many people drink coffee—63% of Americans drink it every day, with an average of 3.2 cups per coffee drinker, according to the National Coffee Association—there has been a lot of research to determine if it’s healthy. Drinking up to six cups per day has been found not to increase the risk of death from cancer or cardiovascular disease—or in general. (Keep in mind that in most studies we’re talking little 8-oz. cups, but still—that’s a lot. A venti at Starbucks is 20 oz., or 2.5 cups.) Even better, coffee consumption has been shown to be associated with lower risk for several different kinds of cancer, as well as many liver conditions and even neurodegenerative conditions like Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease. The most common downsides in the literature affect women, who seem to exhibit an increased (albeit very small) risk of bone fractures if they consume lots of coffee; and, when pregnant, it’s possible—due to an interlocking set of characteristics of how caffeine interacts with the body—that a baby can get an unwelcome super-dose of caffeine when mom drinks coffee. Expecting mothers should drink coffee in moderation.
If there’s another commonly-cited downside to coffee consumption, it’s that there is a minor potential for raised cholesterol levels. But here’s where things get interesting: Using a paper coffee filter can prevent that from happening. Substances in the oily part of coffee called cafestol and kawheol, which stimulate LDL-cholesterol levels, get captured by a paper filter—something that doesn’t happen if you’re having French press, Turkish coffee, or cowboy coffee. (Instant coffee also has lower levels, and espresso is somewhere in between.)
Which might get you wondering: There are about a million ways to make a cup of coffee. Does it matter which one you choose? I’d spent all my time questioning whether to take my mochas with whip, or how many sugars to add at Dunkin’, or what the hell non-dairy creamer even is…but once I went black I’d never stopped to ask whether it mattered if you do drip or French press, or whether the roast matters, or if the different species of coffee bean—yep, there are different species—are any better or worse for you.
It turns out that’s a much more difficult question to answer than whether coffee is generally good for you. I reached out to the UC Davis Coffee Center, the premiere American institution for the study of coffee, and a nutritionist there, Angela Zivkovic, told me there isn’t a lot of funding available for new health research around coffee—which helps explain why, if you’ve noticed, many of the articles linked to in this article are surveys of the existing body of research, rather than brand-new studies. But the team at UCD also suggested that if I looked for international research, I might have more luck. (Coffee isn’t an important crop to the U.S., economically, so we don’t tend to fund research for it the way we might for, say, corn.) With that advice, I managed to catch wind of Italian researchers who had examined the chemical compounds present in coffees from different regions. I reached out to one, Alessandro Palmioli, and while he noted that he and his colleagues were molecular biologists and not medical doctors, and thus couldn’t make pronouncements about health, he passed along some of their recent work.
While the origin of the bean doesn't matter, the species does.
Coffee, it turns out, is a dazzlingly rich stew of compounds, some from the bean itself and some from changes the beans undergo in the roaster. That makes it pretty hard to study. But Palmioli and his colleagues zeroed in on three healthful compounds: trigonelline, choline, and chlorogenic acids. Trigonelline does all kinds of things, including bulwarking the brain against Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, and being anti- all kinds of nasty stuff, like tumors, bacteria, and viruses; choline is a nutrient useful in many metabolic processes; and chlorogenic acids are antioxidants that also help with other maladies, including cardiovascular disease. They studied medium-roast coffee beans from Colombia, Brazil, Burundi, Guatemala, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Vietnam, and India, including, notably, both species of the coffee plant—Coffea arabica and Coffea canephora, more commonly known as “robusta”—that are cultivated for drinking. They found that while the origin of the bean didn’t matter, the species did: after roasting, arabica coffee has a more favorable balance of healthy compounds than robusta. (An aside on roasting: Roasting degrades chlorogenic acids, but builds up brown compounds called melanoidins that are good for you. And some recent research found that dark roast extracts were more helpful than light roast extracts when it comes to Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. So with the research out now, choosing a roast based on health is probably a wash.)
Anyway: So arabica is the way to go. That’s a wonderful finding, because arabica coffee accounts for 60% of the world’s coffee production, and is more prized for its flavor than robusta.
Ah, flavor. If there’s one thing I learned as I shifted to taking my coffee black, it’s that a good, plain cup of Joe is subtle, nuanced, and complex. And in trying to figure out how healthy it is, what I’ve learned is that that complexity, that confounding mix of compounds that makes it hard to study—is also what makes it healthful. In other words, if you really like coffee, what makes it taste so good is also what makes it good, period. In my experience, the opposite is usually true—it certainly was when I was still loading my morning ritual with sugary, fattening, unspoilable mystery liquid. (Luckily, the only thing I really taste in that stuff now—which, yes, I still drink occasionally when I visit my mom at the holidays—is nostalgia.) Which means, ultimately, I can feel pretty good about drinking lots of coffee. As long as I keep buying the good stuff and using a paper filter.
Like what you just read? You’ll love our magazine! Go here to subscribe. Don’t miss a thing by downloading Apple News here and following Prevention. Oh, and we’re on Instagram too.
You Might Also Like
