New Study Shows the Good and Bad of Coffee Consumption
Some swear by it, and others swear against it. Regardless of which side you come down on, there's no denying that coffee is an integral part of life.
According to a new study published by The New England Journal of Medicine (and reported on by CNN), the debate around coffee is unlikely to subside any time soon, with findings suggesting both upsides and downsides: Drinking at least a cup of coffee per day might make you move more, but it also might make you sleep less. What's more — and to the shock of no one who has ever consumed caffeine — it might put you at a higher risk for heart palpitations.
"The big-picture finding is that there isn't just one single health-related consequence of consuming coffee, but that the reality is more complicated than that," said the study's lead author, Dr. Gregory Marcus, a cardiologist and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.
"The great majority of research on the topic has been observational, meaning we just look and see at what happens to people who do and don't drink coffee, which is profoundly limited by the possibility that ... there may be some other characteristic that is driving whether someone happens to drink coffee," Marcus said. "The only way to mitigate those potential effects was to conduct a randomized interventional trial."
According to CNN, "the authors recruited 100 healthy adults who were age 39 on average and from the San Francisco area. They equipped the participants with Fitbits to track their steps and sleep, continuous blood glucose monitors and electrocardiogram devices that tracked their heart rhythms. Each participant was randomly assigned to drink as much coffee as they wanted for two days, then abstain for two days, repeating that cycle over a two-week period.
"On coffee-drinking days, participants got an average of 1,058 more steps than they did on abstention days, the authors found. But on those days, sleep took a hit, with participants getting 36 fewer minutes of shut-eye. The more coffee they drank, the more physical activity and the less sleep they got."
Unsurprisingly, coffee affects the heart, too: Drinking more than one cup a day resulted in a roughly 50% higher incidence of premature ventricular contractions compared with days of no coffee intake. More detailed results can be found on CNN.