💓 Heart: Coffee May Be Good for Your Heart, New Research Suggests, UK Study

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- 'Study suggests the heart benefits from coffee — but the preparation method matters.' Salon, Oct. 4, 2022. 🧡❤💖

- Instant, ground or decaf? New study finds some forms of coffee improve heart health more than others. -

Don't talk to me till I've had my morning heart medication. It may sound weird, but there's something about coffee that seems to boost heart health — and certain types of coffee seem to be better than others. New research in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology analyzed a large database of coffee drinkers and found that people who drank around 2 to 3 cups per day had better cardiovascular health than controls.

Coffee is the most widely used drug on the planet, enticing people with its cognitive-enhancing abilities since at least the 15th century. But it's much more than its principal ingredient, caffeine. The brew also contains dozens of other chemicals, including cafestol and kahweol, which can have biological effects on the body, just like drugs. But when it comes to coffee and the heart, research has been conflicting and inconclusive whether it helps or harms cardiovascular health.

"The relationship between coffee drinking and cardiovascular disease has been controversial," researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences reported in 2019. "However, most follow-up studies did not have direct evidence that coffee can cause cardiovascular disease." Caffeine has vasoconstrictor properties, meaning it causes blood vessels to squeeze together, which can briefly raise heart rate. But this effect is typically minimal, and in many cases, the opposite is seen: caffeine vasodilates or causes the blood vessels to relax and widen. (Fun fact: this is why coffee seems to help you poop.) Because caffeine works on so many different parts of the body, its behavior can be somewhat complex.

(Related: Some coffee drinkers claim it causes anxiety. Here's what the science says)

Regardless of caffeine's effect on blood pressure, some health experts have warned against using it, especially in people with cardiovascular diseases. To better understand this relationship, a team of Australian researchers looked at nearly 450,000 patients in the UK Biobank data set, a long-term study that has been following patients since 2006. Participants were surveyed about their coffee use, including frequency and what type of coffee they consume: ground, instant or decaf. More than 100,000 non-coffee drinkers were included as controls...

- Read More, https://www.salon.com/2022/10/04/coffee-may-be-good-for-your-heart-new-research-suggests/