Today I Learned: Drinking Coffee in the Morning Lowers Your Risk of Dying

If you justify excessive coffee consumption by saying it can help you live longer, congratulations—you may actually be right. But only if you drink it in the morning.
New research suggests that the time of day you down your cup of joe could play a significant role in reducing your risk of early death. The study, published recently in the European Heart Journal, found that people who drank their coffee in the morning had a lower risk of dying from cardiovascular disease and a lower overall mortality risk compared to all-day coffee drinkers.

“This is the first study testing coffee drinking timing patterns and health outcomes,” said lead researcher Dr. Lu Qi, HCA Regents Distinguished Chair and professor at the Celia Scott Weatherhead School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine at Tulane University, New Orleans. “Our findings indicate that it’s not just whether you drink coffee or how much you drink, but the time of day when you drink coffee that’s important.

“We don’t typically give advice about timing in our dietary guidance, but perhaps we should be thinking about this in the future,” he adds.

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How Morning Coffee Benefits You

Previous research has suggested that drinking coffee does not increase the risk of developing cardiovascular disease and can even lower the risk of certain chronic diseases like type 2 diabetes. But this latest study is the first to test whether the timing of coffee consumption matters.

Researchers from Tulane University analyzed data from 40,725 adults who participated in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey in the US between 1999 and 2018. These individuals were asked about their daily food and drink consumption, whether or not they drank coffee, and when and how much they consumed it.

Around 36 percent of coffee drinkers who participated in the study drank their coffee in the morning, while 16 percent drank coffee throughout the day (morning, afternoon, and evening). Forty-eight percent were not coffee drinkers.

For almost a decade, Dr. Qi and his team tracked the participants, noting their information records and causes of death. They found that compared with people who did not drink coffee, morning coffee drinkers were 16 percent less likely to experience premature death from any cause and 31 percent less likely to die of cardiovascular disease.

Morning coffee drinkers also benefited from the lower drinks whether they were moderate drinkers (two to three cups) or heavy drinkers (more than three cups). Light drinkers or those who drank a cup or less benefited from a smaller decrease in risk.
It is worth noting that there was no reduction in risk for all-day coffee drinkers compared to non-coffee drinkers.

According to Dr. Qi, further studies are needed to validate their findings, along with clinical trials to test the potential impact of changing the time of day when individuals consume coffee. However, he offers a reason as to why drinking it in the morning has an advantage.

“This study doesn’t tell us why drinking coffee in the morning reduces the risk of death from cardiovascular disease. A possible explanation is that consuming coffee in the afternoon or evening may disrupt circadian rhythms and levels of hormones such as melatonin. This, in turn, leads to changes in cardiovascular risk factors such as inflammation and blood pressure,” he explains.

Should You Start Drinking Coffee in the Morning?

While this latest study offers exciting insight, the researchers also acknowledge several limitations. First, recollections of dietary intake are subject to inaccuracies or biases and don’t account for long-term habits. Second, while the team considered multiple confounders, it’s possible there were others that couldn’t be completely ruled out, like variations in work shifts and times of getting up for the day.

Third, consuming coffee in the morning may already be a marker for having an overall healthier lifestyle. For example, these morning coffee drinkers may be more willing to exercise and adopt a healthy diet. Fourth, genetic information was unavailable, so the authors could not examine the association between genetically determined caffeine metabolism rate and patterns of coffee drinking timing. Lastly, since this survey was conducted in the United States, it is unclear whether the findings can be generalized to other countries with different cultures related to coffee.

Whatever time of day you have your espresso, coffee can still be good for you, provided you drink it in the right amounts. According to the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, coffee contains antioxidants and other active substances that may reduce internal inflammation and protect against certain diseases, including stroke, diabetes, and cardiovascular and kidney disease. For women coffee drinkers, researchers have found that they were 26 percent less likely to develop colon cancer.

So, yes, coffee is good for you! Just remember that too much of anything can lead to bad outcomes. Excessive caffeine intake can lead to increased heart rate, high blood pressure, anxiety, and trouble falling asleep.

But don’t worry, you can avoid all these by consuming the right amount of coffee—about 400mg of caffeine or up to four cups a day—and drinking it in the morning.