For many, coffee is the magic drink that kicks off the day, a much-needed afternoon pick-up, and most often even a well-appreciated after-dinner digestive. How much coffee is too much, but again? New major research claims to hold the answer.
“What in the world could be more luxurious than a sofa, a book and a cup of coffee?” Then the Victorian author Anthony Trollope wrote in his 1855 novel The Warden.
No matter what draws people to coffee — be it taste and aroma or effects as a stimulant — it is undeniable that this is one of the world’s most popular beverages.
In the United States, coffee drinking has even increased. Statistical reports indicate that in the financial year 2018/2019 alone, people in the United States consumed almost 265 million 60 kilos of bags of coffee.
According to the same reports, this is significantly more than those consumed during the previous financial year.
Other statistics show that almost half of young adults (aged 18-24) reported drinking coffee for 2018 and about three-quarters of older adults reported the same.
Many recent studies have suggested that drinking coffee can provide a number of benefits in addition to increasing focus and productivity. In fact, researchers have argued that coffee can help maintain brain health, help increase a person’s lifespan and even lower prostate cancer.
However, as with any food or drink — even the most nutritious and healthy ones — there is a limit to how much coffee we can consume.
Not only can drinking too much coffee lead to bad effects in the short term — some of the symptoms of overcaffeination are headaches, dizziness, and nausea — but having too much of this drink can increase the risk of developing cardiovascular disease.
How much is “too much” for the heart? This is the question that researchers at the University of South Australia in Adelaide aimed to answer in their new study whose findings now appear in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Researchers identify “tipping point”
The researchers build on previous studies that indicate that people with a specific variant of the gene CYP1A2, which plays a key role in caffeine metabolism, metabolize this substance less efficiently. This can give them an increased risk of developing high blood pressure (hypertension) and cardiovascular disease.
In the new study, the researchers wanted to determine how much coffee would increase the cardiovascular risk for people with and without this genetic variant.
To find out, they analyzed the data of 347,077 people aged 37-73 years, of whom 8,368 had diagnosed cardiovascular disease. The researchers gained access to this data through UK Biobank.
“An estimated 3 billion cups of coffee are enjoyed every day around the world,” explains study author Elina Hypp. For this reason, she explains that “knowing the limits of what is good for you and what is not is crucial.”
“As with many things,” she warns, “it’s about moderation; overindulge and your health will pay for it. ”
In their analysis, the researchers looked at how much coffee the participants drank per day if they had the genetic variant that resulted in slow caffeine metabolism and how likely they were to develop cardiovascular disease.
They found that despite the fact that people without the specific genetic variant CYP1A2 were able to process caffeine four times faster than those with it, they did not appear to have a significant impact on their cardiovascular risk. However, the amount of coffee they ate per day did.
In fact, all the people who often drank six or more cups of coffee a day — the researchers had defined a cup containing about 75 milligrams of caffeine — a modest increase in cardiovascular disease.