The Health Benefits of Morning Coffee Drinking

In exciting news for coffee lovers everywhere, a recent study published in the European Heart Journal provides very encouraging evidence of a link between morning coffee drinking and health benefits. The study, which ran over a 10-year period and analysed the coffee consumption habits of 40,725 adults, indicated that those people studied who drank coffee, and did so in the morning, were 16% less likely to die of any cause, and 31% less likely to die from cardiovascular disease, compared to those who went without coffee.

It seems that the time of day when coffee is consumed plays a big part in the subsequent health benefits. As Professor Lu Qi, an expert in nutrition and epidemiology at Tulane University in New Orleans, said: “It’s not just whether you drink coffee or how much you drink, but the time of day when you drink coffee that’s important… We don’t typically give advice about timing in our dietary guidance, but perhaps we should be thinking about this in the future.”

The results further indicated that morning coffee drinkers had a lower risk of death whether they were moderate coffee drinkers on two to three cups a day, or heavy coffee drinkers who consumed more than three cups daily, while the health benefit was smaller for those who drank only one cup in the morning (the study’s findings were assessed by analysing medical records for the participants for nine to 10 years after enrolment in the survey.)

For a possible reason behind this fascinating link between morning coffee consumption and the health benefits, the researchers discussed the presence of anti-inflammatory compounds in a morning coffee; some substances in the blood that drive inflammation often peak in the morning and could be countered by these anti-inflammatory compounds found in a morning coffee. “This explanation applies to both caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee” the researchers wrote.

The study was confident in its conclusions that a morning coffee drinking pattern was linked with a lower risk of all-cause mortality, as well as a lower risk of cardiovascular-specific mortality: “We observed that a higher amount of coffee intake was significantly associated with a lower risk of all-cause mortality and CVD-specific mortality.”

This latest research builds on a 2022 UK Biobank study, which found that those who drank up to three cups of coffee a day had a healthier heart than those who did not drink coffee, and, as noted in the study, “Most prospective studies have found that moderate coffee consumption is associated with lower risks of Type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), and death.”