Drinking a couple of cups of coffee a day can boost heart health and overall well-being, but does the timing of your coffee habit matter? It seems it might, according to new research in the European Heart Journal.
This study is the first to look into how the timing of coffee affects heart health. It found that people who have their coffee in the morning have a lower risk of dying from heart disease compared to those who drink throughout the day or not at all. Morning coffee drinkers also tend to live longer overall than others.
Dr. Lu Qi, a researcher involved in the study, noted the importance of not only drinking coffee but when you drink it. While dietary advice often ignores timing, it might be a factor worth considering in the future.
Earlier research has shown that coffee can lower the risk of type 2 diabetes without increasing heart disease risk. However, the timing of coffee consumption hadn’t been studied in relation to health benefits before this.
To explore this, researchers analyzed data from over 40,000 adults participating in the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey from 1999 to 2018. These participants reported what they ate and drank over a day, including the amount and timing of their coffee intake. Another group of 1,463 adults helped validate these patterns, and the data was compared against death records over about a decade.
About 36% of participants drank coffee mainly before noon, 16% drank it throughout the day, and 48% didn’t drink coffee at all. The findings showed that morning coffee drinkers had a 16% lower chance of dying from any cause and a 31% lower chance of dying from heart disease than non-coffee drinkers. All-day coffee drinkers didn’t appear to gain any advantage over those who didn’t drink coffee.
The benefits for morning coffee drinkers were consistent regardless of how much coffee they consumed daily, though the effects were slightly weaker for those who had just one cup or less per day.
Despite controlling for various factors like diabetes, smoking, and physical activity, the study had its limitations. Being observational, it doesn’t establish a cause-and-effect relationship, and further studies are needed to confirm these findings in other groups of people.
The study didn’t specifically explain why morning coffee might be better for the heart, but one reason could involve how coffee affects our circadian rhythm, the body’s internal clock that manages sleep and other functions. Drinking coffee later in the day might interfere with melatonin, a hormone involved in sleep, affecting the body’s natural rhythm and sleep quality.
Disrupting sleep can impact heart health since sleep helps manage blood pressure. If sleep is disturbed, blood pressure might remain higher, increasing the risk of heart disease and stroke. The study authors also suggested that coffee’s anti-inflammatory benefits may be more effective in the morning, aligning with the peak of certain inflammatory markers in the blood at that time.
In summary, enjoying your coffee in the morning seems to be beneficial for health. If you need an afternoon energy boost, aim to finish your coffee at least nine hours before bedtime, as more recent research suggests that consuming coffee too close to bedtime can disrupt sleep.
