A new study found that drinking coffee in the morning can help lower the risk of mortality than drinking coffee later in the day. The study, published in the journal European Heart Journal, revealed that people who consumed coffee in the morning had a lower risk of dying from cardiovascular disease and a lower death risk than all-day coffee consumers.
Dr. Lu Qi, HCA Regents Distinguished Chair and professor at Tulane University’s Celia Scott Weatherhead School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in New Orleans and lead author of the study in a news release said, "This is the first study testing coffee drinking timing patterns and health outcomes." He added, "We don’t typically give advice about timing in our dietary guidance, but perhaps we should be thinking about this in the future."
Dr. Qi says that research so far suggests that drinking coffee doesn’t raise the risk of cardiovascular disease, and it seems to lower the risk of some chronic diseases, such as type 2 diabetes. "Given the effects that caffeine has on our bodies, we wanted to see if the time of day when you drink coffee has any impact on heart health."
For the study, the researchers included more than 40,000 adults from the US National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) between 1999 and 2018. Participants were asked about all the food and drink they consumed on at least one day, including whether they drank coffee, how much and when. It also included a sub-group of 1,463 people who were asked to complete a detailed food and drink diary for a full week.
The researchers found that nearly 36% of people in the study were morning coffee drinkers, 16% of them drank coffee throughout the day and 48% were not coffee drinkers.
The study found that morning coffee drinkers were 16% less likely to die of any cause and 31% less likely to die of cardiovascular disease.
The researchers also revealed that there was no reduction in risk for all-day coffee drinkers compared to non-coffee drinkers.
Dr. Qi said, "This study doesn’t tell us why drinking coffee in the morning reduces the risk of death from cardiovascular disease. A possible explanation is that consuming coffee in the afternoon or evening may disrupt circadian rhythms and levels of hormones such as melatonin. This, in turn, leads to changes in cardiovascular risk factors such as inflammation and blood pressure.
"Further studies are needed to validate our findings in other populations."
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