One Cup of Coffee a Day: Discover the Health Benefits

For many people, coffee is an essential morning ritual to wake up, but it is also one of the healthiest drinks in the world, one that scientists continue to study constantly.

Decades of research and thousands of studies have shown that drinking coffee every day can significantly protect the body from some of today’s most serious diseases.

Although the World Health Organization considered coffee potentially carcinogenic in the early 1990s, recent findings have completely dismissed those doubts, showing that early studies ignored one key fact — that many coffee lovers at the time were also smokers.

Today, this favorite drink is known to contain more than a thousand chemical compounds, including polyphenols and vitamins, with powerful anti-inflammatory properties.

According to a major review published in the scientific journal “Nutrients,” people who regularly drink coffee have a significantly lower risk of premature death compared with those who do not consume it at all.

Protects the liver and helps prevent diabetes

After decades of research, one of the most consistent findings is that coffee is good for the liver. A large study published in 2021, which followed nearly half a million adults for 11 years, showed that those who drank coffee had a 21 percent lower risk of developing chronic liver disease and even a 49 percent lower risk of dying from these diseases. The reduced risk is associated with just one cup of coffee a day, while those who drink three to four cups a day benefit even more. Chlorogenic acid from coffee improves the liver’s response to insulin, while other compounds reduce inflammation.

Improved insulin sensitivity also explains why coffee lovers have a lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes. Scientists have determined that the likelihood of developing this disease decreases by about six percent with each cup consumed per day. This has been confirmed by numerous studies conducted on more than one million participants, showing that coffee polyphenols protect the insulin-producing cells of the pancreas.

Coffee may also reduce the risk of developing Parkinson’s disease, and scientists believe caffeine is mainly responsible for this. In a large meta-analysis that included data from twenty studies involving more than one million people, it was determined that people who drank up to three cups of coffee a day had a 28 percent lower risk of developing this disease compared with those who do not drink coffee.

Caffeine helps prevent the degeneration of neurons that release dopamine, the loss of which leads to the motor problems characteristic of Parkinson’s disease.

Regular physical activity is key to good health, and science has confirmed that coffee can encourage more movement. In a study published in 2023 in the New England Journal of Medicine, scientists found that participants took an average of one thousand more steps on the days they drank coffee than on the days they abstained.

Experts who conducted the study emphasize that an additional one thousand steps per day is associated with a six to 15 percent reduction in mortality risk.