Like a baby barista during the mid-day rush, coffee research is really getting into the weeds. We’ve moved past the courtship phase, the will-they-or-won’t-they between coffee and good health, and we’re in it for the long haul, the minutiae of the day-to-day co-existing. It’s not about if coffee is good for you anymore—that much is a given—and now we’re deep-diving into when, exactly, during a given day’s 24 hours coffee might be best to consume, health wise. And according to a new study, drinking coffee during one particular time of the day has been linked a lower risk of all-cause mortality.
As reported by CNN, the new study was published earlier this week in the European Hearth Journal, epidemiologist from Harvard, Tulane, and George Washington University sought to determine how daily coffee consumption patterns affected all-cause and cause-specific mortality. For it, the researchers examined “40,725 adults from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey 1999–2018 who had complete information on dietary data and 1463 adults from the Women’s and Men’s Lifestyle Validation Study who had complete data on 7-day dietary record.”
They then culled the participants down to two primary groups: those who drank coffee in the morning (36% of all participants) and those who drank coffee throughout the day (14%). After adjusting for confounders like “sleep hours, age, race, ethnicity, sex, family income, education, physical activity levels, a dietary score, and health conditions such as diabetes, hypertension and high cholesterol,” they found that the morning-only coffee drinkers were associated with a significant lower risk of all-cause mortality, around 16%, as well as a 31% decrease in cardiovascular disease-specific death when compared to those who didn’t consume coffee.
No association could be established for all-day coffee drinkers, per the study.
These findings have led the researchers to posit that “drinking coffee in the morning may be more strongly associated with a lower risk of mortality than drinking coffee later in the day.”
The study is only observational, meaning a causal link hasn’t been established, and other confounders are in need of consideration before drawing any final conclusions. It could be the case, for instance, that those who only drink coffee in the morning are more inclined to exercise more, sleep more regularly, and eat better, whereas as all-day drinkers may be more likely to partake in unhealthy habits. I know that I never had a coffee after 10:00pm that wasn’t accompanied by something deadly. Still, other potential explanations point to coffee later in the day disrupting circadian rhythms and hormone levels, which would in turn lead to “higher levels of blood pressure and oxidative stress, and greater cardiovascular disease risk.”
Luckily for me, I’m a morning coffee drinker by necessity; anything coffee after noon gives me a real bad case of the sleepies. But for everyone else, maybe consider cutting back on the late-night caffeine, at least until science gets this mess all sorted out.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
