A Massive New Study of 40,725 People Says Drinking Coffee Like This Protects Your Heart and Helps You Live Longer

It starts with the fact I vividly remember what I did before my very first day of work, long ago, after college. I had it in my head that what adults do before work is to stop on the way to get a cup of coffee.

I was probably inspired by seeing my father drink coffee every morning, or the 80 million TV commercials I’d seen by then, or even by the opening lyrics to Dolly Partons’ theme song to the 1980 movie, “9 to 5.”

Regardless, I remember pulling into the drive-thru at Dunkin’ Donuts in my 1988 Nissan Sentra and ordering a small black coffee. Even then, I had a feeling that this might be a career-long habit, and I remember telling myself that it was good that I started out drinking it without dairy or sugar.

Heck, the National Coffee Association says 63 percent of Americans drink coffee every day, and that the vast majority of them (well over 80 percent) drink it either with breakfast or later in the morning.

Writing in the European Heart Journal, researchers said they studied the coffee consumption habits of 40,725 Americans who were included in the 19-year-long U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.

By charting how much coffee each respondent said they drank and what times of day they drank it, the researchers were able to link their habits to records on whether they were still alive at the end of the study period (and if they’d died, what the cause of death was).

The researchers were mindful, of course, of our old friend “correlation versus causation,” meaning that it could be (for example), that morning coffee drinkers were also more likely to engage in some other habit that related to lower risks of cardiovascular disease.

Still, this is one of the few coffee studies we’ve reported on in which the risks seem so low, and the potential benefits so high, that the researchers were comfortable taking the additional step of suggesting people consider adopting a morning coffee habit–instead of simply calling for more research.

This is the first study testing coffee-drinking timing patterns and health outcomes. Our findings indicate 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.

The researchers in that last example didn’t look at time of day, but they did conclude that the health benefits came from the idea that “coffee contains more than 1,000 chemical compounds including antioxidants, which help protect cells from damage.”