| If you're like me and are having a serious case of January blues — a two week December holiday in sunny Cape Town will do that to one — then you might find yourself reaching for an extra cup of coffee to get you through the day. New research shows that doing that might actually help prevent death from cardiovascular disease. Don't go signing up for a loyalty card with the local barista just yet though. There's a catch.
The study, published this week in the European Heart Journal, found that the reduced risk of death was only seen in people drinking coffee in the morning. Those glugging away all day didn't see any reduction in risk of death. It's the first study looking at the timing of coffee drinking and health outcomes, says lead researcher Lu Qi, professor at the Celia Scott Weatherhead School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine at Tulane University in New Orleans. Qi and his team looked at more than 40,700 adults who took part in a large national health and nutrition survey between 1999 and 2018. They found that morning coffee drinkers were 16% less likely to die of any cause and 31% less likely to die of cardiovascular disease. That benefit didn't extend to people drinking coffee throughout the day. Timing of when to drink or eat certain things isn't usually given in dietary guidance, says Qi, "but perhaps we should be thinking about this in the future."
People drinking two or more cups in the morning saw the benefit with those drinking one cup or less seeing a smaller decrease in risk of death. The question you might have is why would the timing of your coffee matter? The researchers didn't study that but Qi has a hypothesis. "A possible explanation is that consuming coffee in the afternoon or evening may disrupt circadian rhythms and levels of hormones such as melatonin," he says. "This, in turn, leads to changes in cardiovascular risk factors such as inflammation and blood pressure." There's also a big caveat in that the research is observational. That means that while the researchers can find patterns, like spotting that morning coffee drinking is linked to lower cardiovascular death than all-day caffeine consumption, it can't guarantee that this beverage habit alone caused the lower death risk. It could be that the people who choose to drink coffee in the morning could also happen to have other attributes that lower their risk of cardiovascular disease. Qi says more research is needed, including clinical trials that would test the impact of changing the time a person drinks coffee. In the meantime, a professor at the Royal Brompton and Harefield Hospitals in London Thomas F. Lüscher has some advice in his editorial in the European Heart Journal: "We must accept the now substantial evidence that coffee drinking, particularly in the morning hours, is likely to be healthy. Thus, drink your coffee, but do so in the morning!" — Ashleigh Furlong Get Bloomberg's Weather Watch newsletter to track the market, business and economic impacts of extreme weather from Bloomberg's team of dedicated reporters | 
No comments:
Post a Comment