Most of us find it challenging to function without our daily dose of caffeine. Some of us even get cranky if we don’t get a nice cup of our favourite caffeinated drinks first thing in the morning. It makes sense!
Caffeine, whether it comes from tea or coffee, helps us feel more awake and ready to take on our day. It’s our favourite feel-good beverage. And so, we love it and find it hard to accept that this magic drink may have some negative health consequences as well.
In this article, we will walk you through some potential health implications of caffeine and discuss whether its pros outweigh the cons for you.
What Does the Research Say About the Health Implications of Caffeine?
Athletes, fitness enthusiasts, and unathletic individuals rarely have anything in common. But they do share one thing. Their love for coffee.
Whether you spend your day lifting weights in the gym, typing away at your computer, or scrolling through your social media, you know it is hard to go by without your caffeinated drink.
The benefits of that early morning (or late afternoon) cup of coffee are endless. It gives you an energy boost and helps you feel less tired. It also enables you to think more clearly. But, are these benefits worth the negative impact those cups of coffee may be having on your health?
A team of researchers recently studied the effects of acute caffeine consumption on human health. The study involved 100 participants. These participants were asked to consume coffee for 2 consecutive days. After these 2 days, they had to avoid coffee for 2 consecutive days. This continued over 14 days. The outcomes were tracked by monitoring cardiac activity, step count, and sleep activity.
The Caffeine Affect: What Happens to Your Heart?
Caffeine gives you that energy boost. It may add a kick to your step as you head out to work in the morning. Your favorite caffeinated drink may help you lift better at the gym and enhance your athletic performance. However, it’s not just your body that feels the punch from caffeine. Your heart feels it too.
The study we are discussing here found that the people who consumed caffeine had more atrial and ventricular contractions than those who avoided it for 2 consecutive days.
Atrial contractions are those extra heartbeats that feel like palpitations or as if your heart has skipped a beat. Ventricular contractions are also a type of irregular heartbeat.
According to the study, ventricular contractions were more significant than atrial contractions in people who had consumed coffee. Additionally, people with genotypes that help metabolize coffee faster had more premature ventricular contractions.
Before you go ahead and chuck that bottle of your favorite brew into the bin, let us reassure you that these contractions were not clinically significant and may not be life-threatening for normal, healthy individuals.
However, people with certain heart conditions, like long-QT syndrome, may be more at risk of dangerous arrhythmia in response to caffeine.
The Caffeine Affect: Does It Make You More Physically Active?
If your reason for not quitting caffeine is that it helps you perform better physically, we have good news.
The study we are taking you through concluded that people who consumed caffeinated coffee walked more. They logged more steps than those who did not drink coffee. And it was not even a small difference.
On coffee days, participants walked an extra 1058 steps.
If this helps you make a stronger case for coffee, great. But before you do that, take some time to read the next section that reveals the impact your coffee may be having on your sleep.
The Caffeine Effect: Sleep Time and Quality
If you keep tossing and turning at night, that cup of coffee you had late in the evening (or maybe in the morning if your body metabolizes caffeine more slowly) may be to blame.
Participants who consumed coffee slept 36 minutes less than people who didn’t get that dose of caffeine. Moreover, people who had slower genotypes (slower metabolism for caffeine), experienced larger sleep reductions. And we can see why. With a slow metabolism, caffeine manages to stay longer in their bodies and disrupts sleep time and may be even quality.
This shows that caffeine may have a direct impact on how long and well you sleep and consuming too much or even little bit of caffeine may contribute to reduced sleep.
At this point, you may be ready to fight your case for caffeine with that one argument many caffeine lovers have. Habituation.
You may think that your body might have habituated to caffeine and its implications due to chronic consumption. And this argument may be correct, at least to some level.
Our study found that people who regularly consumed 1 or more cups of coffee had smaller sleep reductions compared to people who consumed less than one cup of coffee per day.
This shows that habituation may lower the negative impact of caffeine on your sleep but it cannot eliminate it completely.
So, What’s the Verdict?
We cannot deny the benefits of caffeine. They are far too clear and well-supported by research. However, research strongly suggests that it does have health implications, the severity of which may vary from person to person.
So, the answer to the question we started with, does caffeine’s pros outweigh its cons?, it depends.
Whether you benefit from caffeine or suffer its harmful consequences depends on how your body responds to caffeine and if you have any existing or family history of certain health conditions like heart disease.
Yes, caffeine does lead to increased atrial and ventricular contractions but the increase isn’t alarming for healthy individuals. It does impact your sleep though, and reduces how long you sleep even if chronic consumption of caffeine has habituated you to it.
But before you think caffeine has won the case since the cons are not that significant, let us inform you that some of its pros may not be that well supported by research either.
Sure, caffeine may have some performance-boosting benefits, but the effect it has on strength and power may be too modest to be considered significant. We’re also not sure if caffeine really boosts your baseline performance or simply helps you reach your true performance potential by eliminating withdrawal symptoms.
Finally, there are very few studies that quantify caffeine’s performance-boosting benefits long-term. Therefore, we cannot conclude with confidence that you can safely attribute increased physical performance to your caffeinated beverage.
In Conclusion
Caffeine will continue to live on as somewhat of a controversial figure in our lives until we have more studies that look into its long-term impact on performance and other vital body functions.
But until then, you can decide whether or not you should eliminate or at least work towards reducing your caffeine consumption by monitoring the impact it has on you.
If coffee makes you more anxious or jittery or you struggle with sleep at night, it might be a good idea to cut caffeine out to see if it is to blame. And if you have a heart condition or think you may have it, it might be best to speak to a qualified healthcare professional to see how much, if any caffeine would be safe for you.
Reference : Marcus GM, Rosenthal DG, Nah G, Vittinghoff E, Fang C, Ogomori K, Joyce S, Yilmaz D, Yang V, Kessedjian T, Wilson E, Yang M, Chang K, Wall G, Olgin JE. Acute Effects of Coffee Consumption on Health among Ambulatory Adults. N Engl J Med. 2023 Mar 23;388(12):1092-1100. doi: 10.1056/NEJMoa2204737. PMID: 36947466; PMCID: PMC10167887.