Coffee and your health
Read time: 5 minutes
Another day, another airport lounge.
Honestly, I think I should have started a blog by now, covering the different lounges and which ones are worth your time.
I'm in a lounge at Gdansk airport, and it's easily the worst one I've been to. But it's got glass bottles of Coke Zero and comfy chairs, so I'm happy.
Anyway, before I board my flight to Athens, I want to share something that fills my heart with wonder and joy. It's something I love more than most things in life...
That thing is, of course, COFFEE!
If you're an avid coffee drinker like me, the next 5 minutes will make you VERY happy.
So grab yourself a coffee and enjoy ☕️
As wonderful as coffee is, it doesn't always get a fair shake.
Why?
Because it contains caffeine, it often gets lumped in with those god-awful energy drinks packed with a load of unnatural ingredients.
(Side note: I have NEVER seen a country that loves energy drinks more than Poland! They've got 10 different brands, and each has 10 different flavours.)
People take the downsides of hammering high-caffeine drinks and pin them straight onto a normal cup of coffee.
Most people never stop to consider coffee’s actual chemistry. It’s far more than a hit of caffeine. It contains a whole range of compounds thought to have antioxidant and anti-inflammatory properties, which sets it apart entirely from an energy drink.
So is coffee actually good for us, bad for us, or somewhere in between?
A few years ago, a major study set out to answer exactly that.
What the big review found
In 2017, Robin Poole and colleagues published an umbrella review in the BMJ titled “Coffee consumption and health.” An umbrella review is essentially a study of studies, pulling together a huge body of existing research to see what the overall picture says. It’s about as strong as this kind of evidence gets.
They wanted to answer three things:
- Is coffee good, bad or neutral for health?
- Do the benefits outweigh the risks?
- And what does that mean in practice for the rest of us?
If you’re a coffee lover like me, the findings are music to your ears.
Overall, coffee was more often linked to benefits than harm, and the biggest benefits appeared around 3-4 cups a day.
Three to four cups, you say, right around my daily average 🙃
More specifically, coffee drinking was associated with:
- A lower risk of dying from any cause, and from cardiovascular disease, including heart disease and stroke.
- A lower risk of several cancers, including prostate and liver cancer.
- A lower risk of type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome and various liver conditions.
- A lower risk of neurological conditions including Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and depression.
That’s some pretty epic reading, isn’t it?
It’s not about the caffeine
Now for the part that surprises most people.
Many of these same benefits showed up in decaffeinated coffee too. That points to something important: it’s the wider mix of compounds in coffee doing the work, not the caffeine on its own.
And this isn’t a one-off finding. A huge 2022 study by Chieng and colleagues, published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, drew on data from nearly 450,000 people in the UK Biobank. It found that ground, instant and decaffeinated coffee were all linked to a lower risk of death and heart disease, with the sweet spot sitting around 2-3 cups a day. Even decaf, with barely any caffeine in it, carried a meaningful benefit.
There was one neat distinction worth knowing. The caffeinated versions (ground and instant) were also linked to fewer heart-rhythm problems like atrial fibrillation. Decaf wasn’t.
So caffeine seems to play a specific role there, while the broader coffee chemistry drives the general heart and longevity benefits.
For anyone highly sensitive to caffeine, or who simply wants to cut down, that’s genuinely good news. You can get many of the social and health perks of a cup of coffee without the caffeine load. A win-win!
When you drink it might matter too
Here’s something brand new, and I’d put money on you not having seen it.
A 2025 study by Wang and colleagues in the European Heart Journal looked at around 40,000 US adults and asked a question nobody had properly tackled before: does the time of day you drink coffee make a difference?
It turns out it might.
People who drank their coffee mainly in the morning were 16% less likely to die of any cause, and 31% less likely to die of heart disease, compared to non-coffee drinkers. People who drank it throughout the day, morning to evening, showed no significant benefit at all.
This lines up neatly with another thing the research keeps telling us: more is not better. Drinking coffee all day long didn’t stack up extra benefits. If anything, a morning-focused habit came out on top.
A few honest words before you get carried away
A quick but important note on all of this.
These are observational studies. They show a strong, consistent association between coffee and better health outcomes, but they can’t prove coffee is the direct cause. It’s compelling, and it’s backed by a lot of data, but it’s association, not certainty.
A few other things to keep in mind:
Coffee still contains caffeine, and you absolutely can overdo caffeine. Some groups, such as pregnant women and people with certain health conditions, may need to limit their intake, so this isn’t blanket advice for everyone.
Your own body is unique. How you handle coffee depends on your personal sensitivity, your gut microbiome, how you brew it, and whether it’s caffeinated or decaf. The same cup can affect two people very differently.
And more coffee does not mean more health. Please don’t go and smash eight cups a day and tell your husband or wife that Mark said it’ll make you healthier. 😂
That’s not how this works, okay.
The bit that actually matters
I’ll finish with something that probably goes without saying.
As brilliant as coffee is, it is not a miracle tool for preventing disease. It never will be.
You still need the fundamentals locked in: a good diet, regular exercise, quality sleep, and the other basics we talk about all the time. Think of coffee as the cherry on top, not a main pillar of your health.
Get the foundations right, and coffee is a lovely bonus. Skip them, and the only thing you’ll really get from your coffee is the buzz.
Now I don’t know about you, but reading all this was music to my ears. I loved coffee before. Now it’s on another level entirely.
On that note, guess what I’m off to do…
P.S. Where’s your spot for the greatest cup of coffee?
My favourite coffee picture is the one below, which has zero filter ☕️
