Many people don’t start their day until they drink good coffee. Just the smell of that dark, rich brew can get your senses stirring, ready for the mood boost we know is coming.
According to a new long-term study in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, coffee’s not just good for health reasons; it may even lengthen life, but only if you prepare it with a filter. Study author Dag Thelle, who is a senior professor in the public health and community medicine department of the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, stated that unfiltered coffee contains substances that increase blood cholesterol. By drinking filter coffee, you can remove these and avoid heart attacks and premature death. This study provides strong and convincing evidence of a link between coffee brewing methods, heart attacks, and longevity.
Drinking filtered coffee better for health
The study followed over half a million healthy Norwegian men and women between the ages of 20 and 79 over 20 years.
Results showed that drinking boiled or pressed unfiltered coffee can raise the risk of death in men aged 60 and above, due to elevated cardiovascular mortality. But drinking filtered coffee through a paper filter was found to be healthier than drinking no coffee at all.
Drinking filtered coffee can reduce the risk of death from any cause by 15%, a 12% decreased risk of death from cardiovascular disease in men, and even a 20% lowered risk of death from heart disease in women when compared to drinking no coffee at all.
The study showed that people who drank one to four cups of filtered coffee per day had the lowest mortality rate. Thelle stated that the finding that people sipping filtered coffee did a little better than people not drinking coffee at all could not be explained by any other variable such as age, gender, or lifestyle habits. So the researchers think that this observation was accurate.
Evidence-based recommendations
According to the American Heart Association, filtered coffee can sharpen your mental focus, boost mood, and also improve athletic performance.
The British Medical Journal published a large umbrella study back in 2017 that looked at over 200 meta-analyses of the health benefits of coffee and found that drinking three to four cups of black coffee a day provides the most health benefits in general. Those included lowering the risk of heart disease, neurological, metabolic, and liver disorders, various types of cancer, as well as overall mortality. Other studies have found that coffee reduces the risk of suffering from melanoma, type 2 diabetes, liver disease, prostate cancer, heart disease, multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer’s, computer-related back pain, and many more.
