Up to 25 cups of coffee a day still safe for heart health, study says
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Okay, so maybe 25 cups of coffee a day won't destroy my heart.
But this is what happens when I have 5 cups of coffee a day:
1) I get jumpy and I feel anxious. If I drink too much I start to feel what I can only describe as existential dread (I know it's weird).
2) I can't hold on to things because my hands are shaking.
3) I don't sleep as well at night, even if I don't drink any coffee after 12pm.
4) My lymph nodes start to swell. (This last one was really weird for me when I found out that it was caffeine that was causing the lumps in my breast. I'm pretty sure it's the caffeine since both times I had the lumps I quit coffee cold-turkey and the lumps disappeared.)
I now limit myself to two cups of coffee per day. If I'm feeling indulgent I may have a third cup, but that's not daily.
I've had conversations about an issue with someone at work and the response was "Three cups today huh man?"
I get a bit worked up sometimes with that third cup.
Not weird at all. It’s that free-form, nameless, unspecified anxiety.
I think that's an unfair accusation. The study set out to answer a very specific question, and did so. Knowledge often progresses by building big pictures out of the answers to lots of little questions. In terms of your forest metaphor, I would say that the study is "identifying some specific groups of trees in the forest".
Coffee Drinking Irrelevant To Heart Health, Unsure Why We Were Always Writing About The Health Effects Of Coffee Or Why We Repeatedly Rotated Through Every Possible Position On What They May Or May Not Have Been
One shot of espresso equates to roughly 100mg of caffeine - give or take (a lot).
>How many GreatBrittan cups
Assuming you're British...if you walk Costa and ask for a small black...you're getting around 2 cups worth of caffeine. Just under 200mg. They're not likely to serve you anything north of 400mg.
Tolerances for caffeine are all over the place. I know that personally at around 1000mg per day things go for focused/wired to uncomfortable for me.
25 cups...is at least double that.
it seems the only factor they were checking for (?) was arterial stiffness? if you're arteries aren't stiff but you're hyped and anxious out of this world and have a very elevated heart rate... not sure the stiffness is what matters anymore
1 cup typical drip coffee = ~70-120mg caffeine
25 cups = ~1750-3000mg caffeine
Examine (https://examine.com/nutrition/caffeine-consumption/) recommends up to 400mg/day as safe for healthy adults as in "most healthy people won't experience side effects at this level". It seems like 1000mg is the "beginning" of toxicity for a healthy person. Of course, half-life and time between consumption of different sources makes a difference too.
But 1500, 2000+ in a day? Phew, maybe I'm overly cautious but that just seems unwise for anyone
~70-120mg look like drip brew numbers. Instant tends to run from 30-50mg.
25 cups of instant == ~750-1250mg
(Plus since the '25 cups' only comes from the fact that that is the limit of who they tested, the result is essentially 'we haven't found a level of coffee use that is harmful to the heart, yet'.
When I wake up, I'm actually awake. When I go to bed, I'm actually sleepy. I don't wake up several times during the night anymore, and I'm not falling sleep mid-afternoon ever day.
At some point I stumbled on an article about the adenosine receptors in your brain will actually compensate for this much caffeine by just growing more of them. I also read that you can actually "kill" these extra receptors by going cold turkey for a week.
So I did it, and it sucked (the second and third days were the worst). But that was a year ago and I now get an equal if not better effect from two cups a coffee each day.
The funny thing is, the craving for coffee when I'm at work is when I'm stressed out and want control over something. Well, coffee has a very neat little cause-effect system that would give me something to change reliably.
The problem is, I don't even particularly like the effects of that second or third cup of coffee; I just wanted the control to change my state of mind.
I'm not perfect and I still do reach for that 2nd or 3rd cup sometimes but by realizing I'm a better coworker with just the one first thing in the morning helps a lot.
There's an obvious sampling bias, where if Joyful Joe is happily guzzling his 25 cups a day, he's probably not fighting weird heartbeats and trouble breathing the whole time, whereas Jittery Jim has one cup and talks the ears off his local beleaguered 7-11 worker and has to be dragged out by security only to spend the night awake in bed chewing every loose bit and bob off his own fingers.
Also, IIRC when people say people with heart conditions shouldn't drink coffee they mean "because stimulant overdoses screw up the heart's electrical rhythms and can turn not-so-good oopsies into fatal oopsies" and not "because you'll have a heart attack in 50 years". Heart attacks in 50 years are, however, a good reason to keep away from the delicious cookies you are probably disappearing into your hungry feeding tube washed down with a milk-and-sugar mixture sold at a huge markup because it contains 0.5g of plant material painstakingly harvested by faraway children, but definitely not 25 times a day, because no one's that rich.
> The research also showed that moderate and heavy coffee drinkers were most likely to be male, smoke and consume alcohol regularly
Oh, well, they're dying of heart disease either way, might as well have fun doing it.
Talking about the effect of healthy hearts obscures the effects. I am in stage 2 heart failure (as I have been for a long time). I cannot drink coffee, as it aggravates the tissue.
The study can say whatever it wants about coffee (without caffeine), but the effect of 100mg of caffeine on the heart is detrimental. That dread is the same as many heart-attack-precursor feelings (also documented in EMT training), that racing heart rate is aggravation of the left atrium, that shaking is the fight-or-flight adrenaline (which is what makes us feel good). This looks like a proletariat study. "Sure you can drink as much coffee as you want, as long as you feel good about producing. It's fine until it isn't."
But I've worked with people where effectively there wasn't a moment in the day they weren't drinking coffee and they were going to get more pretty much constantly.
I didn't realize how much people drink until I started.
I find I just like to sip on something constantly, and water gives me a headache.
I'd see a doctor about that, water shouldn't give you a headache unless you drink much more than 6-8 cans worth a day, you might have a sodium deficiency or have something else wrong. Maybe even a sugar come down from the 6-8 cans of soda which is far from healthy.
Not a conscious effort... Just sorta happens.
All these personal anecdotes (when I stopped drinking coffee, my wife returned to me, and I won in Powerball!) sound very strange to me.
Anyway, I'm like you, and actually once said "I have no caffeine sensitivity LIKE AT ALL", and then I cut down from "last coffee before dawn" to "around 1.5L" and the amount of psychological side effects I stopped having did change my life (no Powerball involved). At the time, of course, I would have called such side effects "that's just me". So, mileage varying. And some people are super sensitive to that somewhat racing adrenaline feeling, even though it is not actually dangerous.
For me, it was something I could sip all day long, especially as black coffee is a tasty zero-calorie beverage, and at least in the morning I'd feel that rush of focus. Eventually had to give it up due to insomnia.
I don't have a reference on this, purely looking to learn more about the differences.
Then I read the OP... and yes, it turns out there are people who routinely drink that much coffee in the UK.
Wow.
Can you imagine what one's body would feel like after ingesting 25 -- twenty five -- cups of coffee in a 24-hour period?[a]
[a] Assumes zero hours of sleep per day.
My company had a row of 3 automated espresso machines so I timed the dispensing delay (which happened to be almost exactly the grind time) so that I could pipeline the process using all of them. People were moderately horrified as I filled my coffee cup with a hexa-shot of espresso... but why waste time hanging around the water cooler when you can vibrate in front of your computer?
I've just finished my morning coffee - a 34fl oz French press's worth, black. That's almost 7 "cups" by traditional measure, but it's not a particularly outlandish amount.
Common caffeine contents: Double Espresso ~100mg Starbucks small coffee ~200mg
It doesn't go into too much detail on the research.
Eventually I found this PDF: https://heart.bmj.com/content/heartjnl/105/Suppl_6/A8.2.full...
So this shows an obvious problem with the study. They did not rule out co-factors. If the moderate to heavy coffee drinkers are also smoke and consume alcohol regularly, then this already puts them at a higher risk for heart disease, and likely completely dwarfs any effect of caffeine.
Stiffening of the arteries was not what the doctor at the emergency room mentioned when he told me that I needed to reduce my caffeine intake.
Caffeine content will vary widely depending on the type of bean, roasting time, and the amount of ground beans used to brew the cup.
That's why I always say Study and Research is an ongoing process which people tend to understand the universe, and it maybe wrong and wrong again, until u finally veiled the final secret.
And I really have no idea how to solve it without an effective replication/peer-review process, which is currently not popular for scientists trying to make a name for themselves.
TLDR; arterial stiffness is only one measure of "heart health".
1. I have the feeling both this study and the ones it is trying to contradict are not reproducible, like 99% of other health food type studies
2. Your kidneys are probably going to be the bigger sufferers in this scenario
don't forget about the impact on your mental processes and other effects these substances have on you though. they are arguably much worse than cutting off a few of your life years...
i used to drink loads of coffee. now i only drink it on occasion, and really it's helped my attention become a lot more stable. caffeine and other substances have varying levels of effect on people. for me it's pretty intense, but for the person next to me, they feel nothing of it.
long story short: listen to your own mind and body when it comes to your diet. it will tell you what is good and bad if you listen carefully. if you don't listen, perhaps it will become ill as a form of yelling at you to get your attention... ;D
They aren't saying that drinking coffee doesn't have problems, all they are saying is that it doesn't appear to affect the arteries. They aren't trying to provide an anecdote about simple living, it's testing a hypothesis.