Why do we drink coffee? And how harmless is it?

Even if we don’t all react in the same way to caffeine, certain properties of coffee are universal. It makes for a very useful drink when we need a boost during the day, or at the end of a meal as a gourmet coffee, but you should careful not to drink too much of it.

There are three types of coffee:

• Arabica (Brazil),
• Robusta (Madagascar and Africa),
• or Arabusta – a mixture of Arabica and Robusta.

Robusta is the coffee containing the most caffeine.

An average daily consumption of caffeine is 300mg. One cup of a Arabica coffee contains 50 to 100mg of caffeine while Robusta can contain up to 250mg of caffeine. With these doses, coffee stimulates your responsiveness, your thinking and your vigilance, in other words, everything you need to work better. It wakes you up, stimulates digestion but also increases the amount of urine: so obviously, you go to the bathroom more often!

However, in large quantities, coffee can cause confusion, it can increase blood pressure, speed up your heart rate, and make you feel edgy. On top of that, drinking too much coffee increases the removal of calcium and decreases iron absorption so be careful if you are not consuming lots of calcium and iron to compensate this loss.

A 2011 study * carried out on women consuming five cups of coffee (caffeinated) a day revealed that these women had a 47% less chance of being afflicted by breast cancer. According to other studies, three to four cups a day shows more benefits than risks, such as a reduction in the risk of type 2 diabetes (often caused by an unbalanced diet and being overweight, so in this case, drinking coffee will not be enough to eliminate this risk!), and a lower risk of heart attack.

Caffeine is absorbed up to 30 minutes after consumption and stays, on average, 3 hours in our body (so do not drink too late). It can even cause addiction in high doses. For all these reasons, you shouldn’t drink one cup of coffee after another, instead, you should consume it as part of a balanced diet, especially if you do not add sugar.

Finally, provided you are already healthy, coffee can help you be more efficient at work. However, its consumption is not recommended if you smoke, if you have heart problems or if you are overweight. In the latter case, we can help you find your balance weight thanks to our program Equilibre. If you are a smoker, the Antioxidant program is be more suitable for you.

*Li, J., Seibold, P., Chang-Claude, J., Flesch-Janys, D., Liu, J., Czene, K., … Hall, P. (2011). Coffee consumption modifies risk of estrogen-receptor negative breast cancer. Breast Cancer Research, 13(3). doi:10.1186/bcr2879