Benefits and Disadvantages of Drinking Coffee
It’s a daily ritual for many of us to slowly drink a cup of our favorite coffee in the morning, especially before the long and fulfilling day. However, we don’t always take into consideration the influence that coffee might have on how we feel, and our health.
So, let’s dive into the list of main benefits and disadvantages that the common beverage brings with its delicious taste.
Benefits
- Improve Brain Performance
Thanks to its antioxidants, coffee can reduce the risk of developing brain diseases and depression. It also improves short term cognitive performance. That’s the famous effect that everybody knows: get a cup of coffee to boost yourself before the long day. For some people that effect saves their mornings and empowers them to cope with life challenges.
- Help to Lose Weight
Coffee is a natural diuretic, so it takes part in the body’s digestion cycle. It also boosts your metabolism, so calories burn faster. But don’t consider it the solution for a bad diet. It can only be an additional factor for weight loss, so don’t put too much hope on it.
- Detoxification
Antioxidants aid us to remove harmful toxins from our bodies. That has a positive influence on all the body organs, including skin. Its anti-inflammatory properties can help with acne and make your skin glow. So, learn more about grounds and brewing methods to get the best benefits of coffee antioxidants.
- Reduce the Chance of Type 2 Diabetes
Such coffee’s compounds as chlorogenic acid and quinides are powerful antioxidants that have been thoroughly studied by scientists. Those antioxidants help our bodies to regulate blood sugar and process glucose better. Decaf coffee is a better choice in that case because caffeine may minimize this benefit.
- Give You Extra Power for Workouts
Fitness experts recommend having some coffee before the exhausting session to the gym because its caffeine helps to keep your body alert, so you won’t let yourself give up too quickly. It will make you feel boosted and ready to burn some fat, especially if with an empty stomach. So if you feel like you need more energy for your exercises, give it a try to have a cup of coffee before you begin.
- Provide Good Nutrients
Your cup of coffee provides you with some of the essential nutrients and vitamins for healthy living. Those are vitamins B2, B3, B5, and minerals manganese, potassium, magnesium, and others. Coffee contains them in small amounts, but it’s still good to know that coffee is somewhat beneficial to your diet. Some nutrients together with antioxidants in one drink – that sounds like a good deal.
- Protect You from Parkinson’s Disease and Dementia
Those diseases partially depend on eating habits, level of physical state and mental activity. Several scientific researches show that coffee lovers have a much lower risk of getting those. There is no guarantee that coffee saves you from that, but it’s an interesting fact for all the coffee lovers.
Disadvantages
- Time Consuming
Making coffee by yourself takes some extra time every day, especially if you do the roasting and grinding at home. It can become a daily pleasurable ritual for some of us, but rapid lifestyle doesn’t always give us such a chance. Buying a high-quality coffee machine can easily solve this issue.
- Over-Consuming Can Cause Anxiety
It’s important to consider the right amount of caffeine in your daily coffee. Too high doses might have a bad influence on your blood pressure, cause irritability, stress and overall health issue. If you feel like something keeps bothering you for no reason, try to reduce the number of your daily cups of coffee.
- May Cause Insomnia
Even though coffee gives us extra energy during the day, it also may cause troubles while falling asleep. Some people encounter the vicious circle in which they take too much caffeine in the morning that doesn’t let them sleep at night. That makes them drink even more coffee in the morning, ending up with sleepless nights. The solution would be to reduce the level of caffeine that you take, and never drink coffee 6 hours before bed.
- Caffeine Sensitivity
That term means that some people are intolerant or even allergic to caffeine. Depending on the level of caffeine sensitivity you might be experiencing some issues from slight inconveniences, like little digestive problems, to huge ones, like pain or breaking out in hives. In that case you definitely have a visit to your doctor to check on your health. Then it’s better to switch to decaf coffee, or exclude it from your diet at all, even though that might be a heartbreaking experience.
- Negative Environmental Impact
In the modern world the big number of coffee farmers don’t pay much attention to what their business does to the soil. The cheap kinds of coffee that you will commonly see on the shelves of your local stores are the ones that weren’t grown naturally. That means that the coffee wasn’t grown in the shade as it naturally does, but was cultivated under the sun in intentionally deforested areas. Cultivating coffee on the same land for 15 years causes the soil to be devastated, so no other plants can be cultivated there for years.
- May Cause Serious Health Issues
For people with hypertension, drinking coffee regularly may cause elevated blood pressure for some hours after consumption. For others, it may cause dehydration and dizziness in cases of excess coffee on a daily basis for long periods of time. So make sure not to become a coffee addict, and remember that overall health is much more important than the temporal energy boost.
- Increase Cholesterol Level
This might be disappointing for you if you are a French press coffee lover, but you have to face that truth, until it’s too late. The consumption of unfiltered coffee may raise the level of “bad” cholesterol. You should pay attention to that while choosing the coffee brewing methods, so that you use paper filters to limit the amount of cholesterol that goes to your cup of coffee.
