A warning has been issued for anyone drinking cups of coffee through their day amid the prospect of health risks. As Christmas and the New Year disappears, it has been found pre-lunch brewers enjoy a lower risk of death.
But the benefit vanishes among all-day drinkers. Morning coffee drinkers were 16% less likely to die of any cause, researchers found. “It’s not just whether you drink coffee or how much you drink, but the time of day when you drink coffee that’s important,” said Prof Lu Qi, an expert in nutrition and epidemiology at Tulane University in New Orleans.
“We don’t typically give advice about timing in our dietary guidance, but perhaps we should be thinking about this in the future.” The study drew on the dietary habits of 40,725 adults, according to its researchers based in the US.
READ MORE UK set for -16C snow on Saturday and Sunday with eight cities battered
Prof Thomas Lüscher, a consultant cardiologist at the Royal Brompton and Harefield hospitals in London, nsaid all-day drinkers sleep poorly, because coffee seems to suppress melatonin, a hormone that is important for inducing sleep in the brain.
“This explanation applies to both caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee,” experts write. “Overall, we must accept the now substantial evidence that coffee drinking, particularly in the morning hours, is likely to be healthy,” Lüscher writes.
“Thus, drink your coffee, but do so in the morning!” Dr Lu Qi added: “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.”
He added: “This is the first study testing coffee drinking timing patterns and health outcomes. Further studies are needed to validate our findings in other populations, and we need clinical trials to test the potential impact of changing the time of day when people drink coffee.”