Coffee is one of the most popular beverages in the world, although opinions about its advantages and disadvantages have fluctuated.
There are advantages and disadvantages to the recent findings from a tiny research, which were published Thursday in The New England Journal of Medicine: You may move more but sleep less if you consume at least one cup of coffee each day. You may also be more susceptible to some types of heart palpitations.
Dr. Gregory Marcus, a cardiologist and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, is the study’s lead author and the study’s conclusion’s lead author. “The big picture finding is that there isn’t just one single health-related consequence of consuming coffee, but that the reality is more complicated than that,” Marcus said.
According to Marcus, “the vast majority of research on the subject has been observational, meaning we just look and see what happens to people who do and don’t drink coffee.” This approach is severely constrained by the possibility that “there may be some other characteristic that is driving whether someone happens to drink coffee,” he added. “A randomised interventional trial was the only approach to limit such possible impacts.”
The authors gathered 100 healthy adults from the San Francisco area, with an average age of 39, to better understand the acute health impacts of coffee. The participants were given Fitbits to record their activity and sleep, continuous glucose monitors to monitor their blood sugar levels, and EKG machines to monitor their heart rhythms.Each participant received a random assignment to consume any amount of coffee they pleased for two days, followed by two days of abstinence. This cycle was repeated throughout a two-week period.
On coffee-drinking days, participants got an average of 1,058 more steps than they did on abstention days, the authors found. But on those days, sleep took a hit, with participants getting 36 fewer minutes of shut-eye. The more coffee they drank, the more physical activity and the less sleep they got.