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Coffee Isn’t Giving People Heart Attacks
Despite recent headlines, there’s no strong evidence that office coffee is raising your cholesterol.
For the decade or so that I’ve been writing about health, my passion project has been coffee. I read a lot of research about coffee. I drink at least two coffees a day which means that I’ve got a strong vested interest in knowing whether the delicious dark brew is slowly destroying me from the inside. It’s also a fascinating topic, because as a society we can’t quite decide whether coffee should be good or bad for your health, and there are constant arguments over what the evidence is showing.
Case in point, the new stories about coffee and heart disease. Some are reporting that coffee might raise your cholesterol, and others are directly saying that a coffee in the office could give you a heart attack.
Fortunately for all of us who love our coffees, the evidence is very weak. If you’re worried about your cholesterol, it might be worth considering changing how you brew your coffee, but in general these results are almost entirely unconvincing.
The Data
The new study that has everyone worried is a lab-bench piece of research where researchers attempted to extract chemicals called diterpenes from coffee that had been brewed various ways. They found that coffee which was brewed with a paper filter had very low levels of these diterpenes, but boiled coffee had much higher levels of the chemicals.
They concluded that the paper filters reduce the level of these diterpenes, and argued that people may want to avoid coffee that is brewed without a paper filter.
The basic issue here is that diterpenes have been shown to raise cholesterol levels. The precise quantities that are dangerous is not clear, but some data shows that even relatively small amounts of the stuff can be a problem. One 1994 study found that around 150mg/day of two diterpenes from coffee increased volunteer cholesterol by clinically significant amounts.
