It is ok for your heart to drink up to 25 cups of coffee a day!

As someone who is quite happy living without many of the vices in life, coffee is not one of them. Ok and chocolates. Like most of us, coffee is my pick-me-up when I wake up, go-to when I need a boost while working and a pleasant accompaniment to any conversation. When people tell me, it is also a drug, I counter that it is a drug that I am not addicted to, because I can easily drop it with little side-effects and I often do; you can't say the same about alcohol, cigarettes or other drugs. Coffee consumption in South Africa stood at 809,000 60kg bags in 2017/18 according to Insight Survey's 2019 Coffee Landscape Report and our consumption keeps on growing every year. New research by the British Heart Foundation and Queen Mary University of London has found that as much as 25 cups a day could be fine for your heart. – Linda van Tilburg

By Thulasizwe Sithole

While tea still rules as the world's favourite drink, coffee comes second and while it is often portrayed as a drink that may be bad for you, research led by the William Harvey Research Institute and part-funded by the British Heart Foundation which was presented at a conference in Manchester in early June 2019, debunked previous studies that claimed coffee could increase arterial stiffness. The University studied the effect of coffee om 8000 people and concluded that most moderate to heavy coffee drinkers were likely to be male, smoked and consumed alcohol regularly.

The participants were divided into three groups: those who drank less than a cup a day, those that drank between one and three cups a day and those who drank more than three cups a day and they were given MRI heart scans and infrared pulse wave tests. People who consumed more than 25 cups a day; (goodness who would have thought there are people who do that, were excluded). The researchers found that there was no increase in stiffening of arteries of people who drank up to 25 cups of coffee a day "when compared with those who drank less than one cup a day."

___STEADY_PAYWALL___