This Much Coffee May Help You Live Longer, New Study Suggests

ACROSS AMERICA — Pour yourself a cup of coffee and toast science. New research suggests that drinking several cups of caffeinated coffee or tea a day may protect against Type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease and stroke.

The study by researchers in China and Sweden, published Tuesday in The Journal of Endocrinology and Metabolism, builds on earlier research pointing out the heart health benefits of America’s favorite breakfast drink.

Before they another handful of beans, “coffeeholics” who enjoy more coffee should keep this in mind: The authors emphasized the benefits are associated with moderate coffee consumption — three or fewer cups a day.

The study isn’t the first to stir the pot on what was once generally accepted advice by physicians to their cardio patients to lay off the morning jolts of caffeine. The thinking was that as a stimulant, caffeine could trigger atrial fibrillation and palpitations. Advice changed with as more research suggested coffee was harmful to the heart only among those who had five or six cups a day.

Previous studies have linked coffee consumption with reduced risk of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, type 2 diabetes, liver disease and prostate cancer, and a study in 2022 suggested that people who drink up to five cups of coffee every day have better cardiovascular health than non-coffee drinkers. A 2014 National Institutes of Health study linked the consumption of caffeinated coffee and tea to lower depression rates in older U.S. adults.

Moderation Is The Key

Now, health care professionals are coming around to the idea that drinking one, two or three cups of coffee is not only unlikely to hurt patients with a cardiometabolic disease, but it may also stop them from developing specially among patients who already have one cardiometabolic condition and are at risk of developing cardiometabolic multimorbidity, or CM, defined as two of three conditions — Type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease or stroke.

Moderate amounts of coffee may be prescriptive as a dietary habit with “far-reaching benefits for the prevention of [cardiometabolic multimorbidity],” Dr. Chaofu Ke of the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics, School of Public Health at Suzhou Medical College of Soochow University, in Suzhou, China, the study’s lead author, said in a news release.

The study was based on the coffee and tea drinking habits of 188,000 people ages 37 to 73 who are registered with the U.K. Biobank, a large database of anonymous health information, and answered a questionnaire about what they’d had to drink in the past 24 hours. The researchers also considered the responses of 172,000 caffeinated coffee or tea drinkers who had no history of cardiometabolic disease as a baseline in the study.

An important caveat in the study is that caffeine is only one of the hundreds of thousands of chemical compounds found in coffee and green and black tea. Other components may have an impact, or it could be the health effects result from all of those compounds working together. The researchers also didn’t account for heart disease factors such as smoking, obesity, exercise and diet.

Coffee Has A Dark Side

While the study is part of a growing body of research on the heart health benefits of caffeine, other research has linked high caffeine intake with a greater risk of dementia and stroke.

Caffeine intake can make some kinds of heart disease more dangerous, according to Dr. Luke Laffin, co-director of the Center for Blood Pressure Disorders at Cleveland Clinic. Too much coffee can raise blood pressure in someone who already has hypertension, he told NBC News.

Laffin, who wasn’t involved in the study, told NBC News that it’s too early to draw conclusions from the analysis. “Everything in moderation is probably the best way to do it,” he said.

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How people get their daily jolt of caffeine, as well as their underlying health can make a big difference in health effects, Dr. Stephen Kopecky, a preventative cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, told NBC News.

“The message I don’t want to get out there is that caffeine is good, so let’s take more of it,” Kopecky said. “We have never found that taking what is good in the diet and putting it in a pill is equally beneficial.”

Even a little caffeine can make some people jittery and prone to insomnia, according to Mayo Clinic. People who drink more than four cups of caffeinated coffee a day should probably cut back if they’re experiencing headaches, insomnia, nervousness, irritability, frequent urination, fast heartbeat or muscle tremors, according to Mayo.

Drinking coffee too late in the day can set a hard-to-break pattern of sleep deprivation, Mayo warned in a staff blog, writing, “Caffeine, even in the afternoon, can interfere with your sleep. Even small amounts of sleep loss can add up and disturb your daytime alertness and performance.

“Using caffeine to mask sleep deprivation can create an unwelcome cycle. For example, you may drink caffeinated beverages because you have trouble staying awake during the day. But the caffeine keeps you from falling asleep at night, shortening the length of time you sleep.”

Benefits Are From No-Frills Coffee

Also, experts said, the health benefits of coffee are associated with black coffee and black and green tea with nothing added to sweeten or mellow it out. In other words, don’t count on pumpkin spice lattes to have any positive health benefits beyond the warm, fuzzy feeling of home.

In fact, “if you are going to your favorite coffee shop and ordering a coffee with whipped cream and sugary syrup, you’re consuming a lot of calories, which can contribute to cardiometabolic disease,” Laffin told NBC.

For example, a 16-ounce Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte has 390 calories, 14 grams of fat, 50 milligrams of cholesterol, 230 milligrams of sodium, 52 grams of carbohydrates, 50 grams of sugars. 14 grams of proteins and 150 milligrams of caffeine.