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Good news for coffee lovers and their hearts. Italian researchers report that people who drink two or three cups of coffee a day have lower blood pressure than those who drink less.
Coffee is an integral part of the culture in Italy and is a popular drink all over the world. In the years 2020 and 2021, according to estimates the world consumed almost 10 million tons of coffee. For years, researchers have not always been able to reach an agreement regarding the health consequences of the drink, but recent studies show that drinking coffee can lower the risk of conditions such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and even neurodegenerative and liver diseases. However, the answer to what causes these benefits remains unknown.
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“Caffeine is only one of the several components of coffee and certainly not the only one that has an active role. Positive effects on human health were indeed recorded even among those who consume decaffeinated coffee,” explains the first author of the study Arrigo Cicero, a professor in the Department of Medical Sciences and Surgery at the University of Bologna, in a press release. “We know that caffeine can raise blood pressure, but other bioactive components in coffee seem to balance this effect with a positive end result on blood pressure levels.”
To understand this, a team of researchers was given a sample of 720 men and 783 women from the Brisighella Heart Study. They compared blood pressure levels, coffee consumption habits and other clinical data points for each person.
“The results are very clear: peripheral blood pressure was significantly lower in people who consumed one to three cups of coffee a day than in people who don’t drink coffee,” explained Cicero. Peripheral blood pressure describes pressure measured from the upper arm.
“And for the first time, we were able to confirm these effects also in relation to central aortic pressure, the one closest to the heart, where we see an almost identical phenomenon with completely similar values for regular coffee drinkers compared to non-coffee drinkers.”
High blood pressure has a strong connection to cardiovascular disease due to the high force of blood consistently pushing against the walls of blood vessels, making the heart work harder to pump blood. The findings from this study are valuable because they suggest another potential dietary avenue for lowering blood pressure and preventing cardiovascular disease.
“This is the first study to observe this relationship in the Italian population, and the data confirm the positive effect of coffee consumption on cardiovascular risk,” said Professor Claudio Borghi, who led the study.
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