Coffee Drinks and their Health Benefits

Coffee is delicious — and addictive. For those reasons alone, you would surely expect coffee to be bad for you. Something that we crave and enjoy so much every day can’t possibly be healthy, right?

Luckily for us coffee lovers, though, it turns out that coffee really can be healthy. In fact, drinking coffee is associated with a wide range of health benefits, and scientists seem to be uncovering new ones all the time.

But which kind of coffee drink is the best for your health? And how much coffee is too much, if you want to stay healthy? To answer these questions, we first need to understand how coffee gets its health benefits.

Antioxidants

The main reason that scientists get excited about the possible health benefits of coffee is because it is stuffed full of antioxidants. Antioxidants are a group of natural compounds found in all kinds of foods, such as fruit and vegetables, tea, and chocolate.

Antioxidants can ‘mop up’ certain kinds of toxins in the body when you eat them. Thanks to this ability, antioxidants are linked to a wide range of health benefits. They can help prevent many diseases such as arthritis, heart disease, and cancer. Antioxidants also protect against UV damage and stimulate collagen production, helping to maintain healthy, youthful-looking skin.

Coffee is the number one source of antioxidants in the diet for people in many countries. As such, scientists have good reason to suspect that a coffee habit is a healthy habit, which explains why there is so much research into the health benefits of coffee.

Caffeine

Unlike antioxidants, caffeine is sometimes seen as the ‘bad guy’ in coffee, responsible for a lot of the side effects of drinking too much coffee.

It’s true that if you drink too much caffeine, it can cause health problems such as anxiety, shakes, and an irregular heartbeat — and of course, drinking too much caffeine can interfere with your sleep¹. But most of these side effects stop once the caffeine wears off.

On the other hand, caffeine has been linked with many long-term health benefits — so even if you drank too much coffee today, your coffee habit may still be good for you in the long run.

People enjoy drinking caffeine because it boosts their mood and helps them focus. But it has many long term benefits as well. Caffeine can reduce your risk of diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, and liver disease, and strengthen your immune response². It boosts your metabolism and helps you to burn fat³, and even seems to help prevent depression⁴.

Drinking decaffeinated coffee therefore means that you can avoid some of the side effects associated with having too much caffeine — but you also miss out on a lot of the health benefits of coffee.

The key to a healthy coffee habit is therefore to take caffeine in moderation. Make sure you know how much caffeine is in your coffee, and keep your consumption below 400 milligrams of caffeine per day — equivalent to 2–4 cups of filter coffee per day (or about half that for pregnant women). In these quantities, coffee has an incredible range of health benefits.

Health benefits of coffee

The most important health benefit of coffee is quite simple: Coffee drinkers live longer. Researchers comparing the data from hundreds of different studies found that coffee drinkers were 17% less likely to die early from any cause⁵.

Drinking coffee helps you live longer for several reasons. Firstly, drinking coffee regularly can protect against heart disease. Even drinking just one cup per day can reduce your blood pressure⁶ and reduce the risk of dying from heart failure⁷.

Coffee drinkers are also 18% less likely to develop cancer⁵5. There’s evidence that drinking coffee can prevent prostate cancer⁸, liver cancer⁹, and some types of skin cancer¹⁰.

Coffee can also reduce the risk of developing type II diabetes¹¹, Alzheimer’s disease¹², Parkinson’s¹³, and liver diseases¹⁴. It’s even good for the skin: drinking coffee seems to help protect the skin from the harmful effects of the sun¹⁵.

Coffee is reputed to help digestion and aid weight loss. The evidence for this is less strong, but caffeine does boost your metabolic rate and energy levels, and people who drink coffee are more likely to get exercise¹⁶. This might explain why drinking more coffee seems to be linked to having less body fat¹⁷.

Coffee might also help digestion, since it stimulates the release of digestive enzymes and hormones. Coffee drinkers also tend to have a more diverse range of gut flora, indicating a healthy digestive system¹⁸.

Health benefits of black coffee

A black filter coffee is probably the healthiest way to drink coffee. Unfiltered, coffee contains compounds called diterpenes, that can raise your cholesterol levels. High cholesterol increases your risk of heart attacks or strokes.

A paper filter is remarkably effective at removing diterpenes from coffee. As a result, drinking filtered coffee decreases the risk of dying from heart disease or stroke, compared to drinking unfiltered coffee¹⁹.

Drinking black coffee, without sugar, also maximizes the other health benefits of coffee. Adding milk or sugar adds calories — in the case of large, sugary drinks from chain coffee shops, a lot of calories. This of course counteracts many of coffee’s beneficial effects on heart disease, diabetes, and weight loss.

If you want to drink coffee and stay healthy, then black coffee is the way to go — whether it’s a drip coffee from your coffee machine in the morning, or carefully crafted handbrew from the barista at your favorite cafe.

Health Benefits of Arabic coffee

Arabic coffee, and the similar style of coffee called Turkish coffee, is unfiltered. This makes it slightly less healthy than a filter coffee, because of the possible effect on your cholesterol levels.

Nonetheless, drinking Arabic coffee still provides you with all of the health benefits of coffee. It can reduce your risk of heart disease, diabetes, and cancer, it’s good for your skin, and it might even help you with weight loss.

Arabic coffee has one other clear benefit over other types of coffee: a single serving of Arabic coffee contains a relatively small amount of caffeine. This means that you can drink many cups of Arabic coffee over the course of the day, without overdosing on caffeine. Depending on how you brew it, and how big each serving is, you could drink as many as 30 cups before going over the recommended limit for caffeine.

This also means that Arabic coffee is a good choice on an empty stomach, since the small amount of caffeine means it won’t irritate your stomach lining too much.

Adding spices such as cardamom to arabic coffee can also boost the antioxidant potential of the coffee. Cardamom contains powerful antioxidants, which could boost the health benefits of your morning coffee.

Health benefits of espresso

Espresso coffee is unfiltered, so drinking espresso is again slightly less healthy than drinking plain black filter coffee. This also applies to all of the coffee drinks based on espresso, such as Americanos.

Nonetheless, drinking espresso still provides all of the health benefits of coffee. The only drawback is that it is very strong, which means that it is much easier for an espresso drinker to drink too much caffeine.

Of course, once you add milk, sugar, and syrups to your espresso, then all bets are off. A large iced latte with flavored syrups from a typical chain coffee shop can contain well over 500 calories — 20–25% of the total recommended calorie intake for the day. For the healthiest coffee habit, stick to black coffee, or opt for low fat milk or milk alternatives such as oat milk.

Alternatively, take a tip from TikTok and try drinking your espresso with orange juice. That way, you get all the health benefits of the espresso, along with a dose of vitamin C, fibre, and even more antioxidants in your cup.

Health benefits of green coffee

After coffee’s antioxidants started getting attention for their powerful health benefits, a new trend emerged — green coffee extract. Some antioxidants are destroyed during roasting, so an extract of green coffee could in theory capture even more of the antioxidants within coffee.

There’s some evidence that green coffee extracts might help reduce the risk of heart disease, liver disease, diabetes, and dementia, just as roasted coffee does²⁰. Green coffee also has possible benefits in weight loss, and controlling how glucose is released into the bloodstream after eating²¹. However, since the number of people currently consuming green coffee extracts is small, it’s hard to be sure how strong the effect is.

With coffee drinkers, since so many people drink coffee we can easily see the health benefits that coffee has on the entire population. With green coffee, the results so far are promising, but it’s too early to say how strong the effect is. In this case, the big advantage of coffee is that it is delicious as well as healthy — so you’re more likely to want to drink it regularly!

Health benefits of cascara

Cascara is the husk, or peel of the coffee fruit. In most cases it is discarded after being separated from the green beans, but in some countries the cascara is used to make drinks.

Like coffee, cascara is loaded with antioxidants and caffeine, so it probably has many of the same health benefits. However, there isn’t much research yet into the health effects of cascara, and since not many people drink it, it’s hard for researchers to be sure how strong the health benefits of cascara really are.

Cascara is a promising source of nutrients, though, so it’s likely that we’ll find out more about just how healthy cascara is in the near future.

However you choose to drink your coffee, it’s clear that drinking coffee regularly is good for your health. Black filter coffee might be the healthiest way to drink your coffee, but any coffee is good for you — as long as you don’t overdo it on the caffeine, and as long as you steer clear of all the tempting milk, cream, and sugary syrups.

So go ahead and enjoy your morning coffee every day, safe in the knowledge that not only does it taste good, and make you feel good — it is also good for you.

¹ Reissig et al (2009)

² Kumar et al (2018) 

³ Acheson et al (1980)

⁴ Grosso et al (2015)

⁵ Poole et al 2017

⁶ Grosso et al (2017) 

⁷ Rodríguez-Artalejo and López-García (2018)

⁸ Wilson et al (2011)

⁹ Larsson and Wolk (2007)

¹⁰ Song et al (2012)

¹¹ Carlström and Larsson (2018)

¹² Liu et al (2016)

¹³ Hong et al (2020)

¹⁴ Heath et al (2017)

¹⁵ Fukushima et al (2014) 

¹⁶ Torquati et al (2018)

¹⁷ Lee et al (2019)

¹⁸ Asnicar et al (2021)

¹⁹ Tverdal et al (2020)

²⁰ Bagchi et al (2016)

²¹ Sanlier et al (2018)