Elizabeth Bailey
Coffee is healthy, and a lot of coffee is even healthier – but from what amount is it over and the caffeine hurts your health? Researchers have examined this in a large study – the result was a concrete number.
A coffee for breakfast, a cup in the morning and another in the afternoon – and maybe an espresso after lunch. If your coffee consumption fits that description, there’s no reason to limit yourself. On the contrary: you are doing something good for your health.
This is the conclusion reached by scientists from the University of South Australia in Adelaide. They evaluated the data of 347,077 people to answer the question of how many cups of coffee per day are optimal for health.
5 cups of coffee a day is ideal
The magic number is five – with five cups of coffee a day, health benefits the most and there are no risks. From the sixth cup, however, caffeine becomes a burden on the body. “To maintain a healthy heart and blood pressure, we need to limit our coffee consumption to less than six cups a day – according to our data analysis, this is the tipping point at which caffeine hurts the risk of heart disease,” says a study author Prof. Elina Hypponen.
Six cups of coffee a day increases the risk of heart disease by 22 percent. The coffee study was published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Health benefits of coffee
Coffee has many health benefits – studies show that three to five cups a day help prevent kidney, breast, and prostate cancer. A French coffee study was also able to show that coffee significantly reduces the risk of almost all causes of death.
In an investigation into the connection between coffee consumption and athletic performance, researchers were able to show that athletes “doped” with coffee have more stamina and, on average, can do more repetitions when lifting weights.
