It’s likely that as you read this, caffeine is coursing through your veins. After all, 90 percent of US adults consume the substance in some form daily, according to some estimates. The popular psychoactive compound can alter everything from exercise to antioxidant properties. But, despite its ubiquity, we’re still learning the full extent of caffeine’s effects on our minds and bodies.
A new prospective study published today in the Endocrine Society’s Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism used data from the UK Biobank, a database containing health information on over 500,000 participants, to look at if caffeine-containing products, like coffee and tea, could affect the risk for chronic conditions such as stroke, coronary artery disease, and type 2 diabetes.
The researchers split eligible participants into two groups. In one group of 172,315 people, they measured caffeine intake in milligrams, and in another group of 188,091 people they measured coffee and tea intake in cups. All participants were free of cardiometabolic disease when they were enrolled in the UK Biobank study. The authors then assessed which participants went on to develop multiple cardiometabolic diseases, defined as at least two of the three conditions specified (stroke, coronary heart disease, type 2 diabetes).
They found an association between moderate consumption of caffeine or cups of caffeine-containing drinks with a lower risk of developing multiple cardiometabolic diseases. The authors defined moderate caffeine consumption as 200 to 300 milligrams of caffeine per day, or three cups of coffee. Compared with non-consumers or those who consumed less than 100 mg of caffeine per day, those who drank 3 coffees per day had a 48 percent reduced risk and those who had 200 to 300 mg of caffeine per day had a 40.7 percent reduced risk.
However, this paper only shows an association between caffeine and multiple cardiometabolic diseases, and does not establish a cause-effect relationship. The authors also only examined three cardiometabolic diseases while leaving out others like heart failure, hypertension, insulin resistance, and non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Further, the study specifically look at intake of soft drinks, which can contain significant caffeine but are also associated with health problems like increased risk of cardiometabolic diseases.
But, hey, its still not bad news for coffee and tea drinkers, which is all we could ever ask.
