The prevailing notion is that coffee can hike up blood pressure, creating additional stress on people's hearts, but new research may prove the opposite is true.
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According to new research presented at the American College of Cardiology's 71st Annual Scientific Session last week, drinking two to three cups of coffee a day can actually lower the risk of heart disease and even help lengthen life in both people with and without cardiovascular disease.
"Coffee is pretty fascinating," said Dr. Tom Nguyen, chief of cardiothoracic surgery and co-director of the Heart and Vascular Center at UCSF to KCBS Radio's Liz St. John on Monday.
"Coffee is a very unique drug," he said, in that the effects can be felt within seconds of consuming caffeine. "There's not a whole lot of drugs that can actually do that."
But it might not actually be bad for people as health experts previously thought.
In the research, people who had more than one cup of black coffee a day had 10 to 15% lower risk of heart disease, heart failure, than those who did not. But the results should still be taken "with a grain of salt," said Nguyen.
In the past, that jittery feeling people sometimes would get after perhaps drinking too much coffee was believed to be arrhythmia, where the heart starts beating much faster. But in this study, that didn't seem to be the case. "I think in moderation, coffee is okay," he said.
So while it is safe, the data from the study, which was a huge population study of more than 300,000 people, needs to be further analyzed. For instance, a good number of the people studied were around the age of 57, which is a bit young for developing heart disease.
"In medicine, we call this a selection bias," said Nguyen. "So perhaps those who actually drink coffee are inherently different people."
Maybe those people are just more active on average than those who don’t choose to drink coffee first thing in the morning, he said.
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