I thought this was interesting so I wanted to share it.
Bill Murphy Jr. Contributing Editor
Inc.com
Good morning,
Perhaps you’re reading this with your phone in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, or while heading out from work to meet a colleague for coffee. If that’s the case, new research has some very good news for you–with a small caveat.
Over the past few years, a series of studies have shown that drinking coffee–a lot of coffee–has significant health benefits. The big unanswered question, however, was whether there’s any amount of coffee that’s actually “too much.” Now, a brand-new study from the University of South Australia that examined 347,077 coffee drinkers seems to have found an answer: five cups of coffee per day.
The study was published in the March edition of The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, and publicized last week.
Here’s the background, the new study, and the reason why, when it comes to coffee, five is a magic number.
Study after study suggests real health benefits to drinking coffee. As a coffee fiend myself, I’ve followed several of them over the years, including:
- A study funded by the American Heart Association and the University of Colorado School of Medicine in which researchers found that the risk of heart failure or stroke went down 8 percent for each additional cup of coffee per day.
- A British study of 498,134 people that found that those who habitually drank coffee were between 10 and 15 percent less likely to die during any 10-year period than non-coffee drinkers.
- A Stanford University study that tracked 100 people over several years and found that coffee drinkers tended to live longer than non-coffee drinkers.
- A Spanish study that found that participants who drank four cups of coffee per day had a 64 percent lower risk of dying compared to non-coffee drinkers.
If you read through all of those studies, you’ll come away with the idea that drinking as many as four cups of coffee per day could have some significant health benefits.
But if four is good, then how about five? And if five is good, why not 10?
While I consider myself a pretty serious coffee drinker, the truth is I would rarely go past three cups in a day: one or two with breakfast, and perhaps one in the afternoon.
According to this new study out of South Australia, however, I’ve got some room to go before hitting the danger area. The problem is the point at which the increased stimulation can lead to heart problems.
“In order to maintain a healthy heart and a healthy blood pressure, people must limit their coffees to fewer than six cups a day–based on our data six was the tipping point where caffeine started to negatively affect cardiovascular risk,” said Elina Hyppönen of the Australian Centre for Precision Health, one of the study’s authors.
Once you reach six cups of coffee per day, the risk of heart disease increases by 22 percent, according to the study.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.