Your daily cup of joe might be a quick pick-me-up, but it comes with a mixed bag of good and not-so-good effects on your heart health, a new study reports.
Drinking coffee helps people stay more active, but it also significantly robs some of sleep, researchers say.
How does coffee affect your heart?
While java doesn’t seem to cause irregular rhythms in the upper chamber of the heart, it can cause the lower chambers to skip beats, according to findings presented Sunday at the online annual meeting of the American Heart Association.
“People should understand that this extremely commonly consumed beverage really does have substantive effects on our health, and they’re variable,” Dr. Gregory Marcus, lead author and associate chief of cardiology for research at the University of California, San Francisco says. “It’s not that coffee is necessarily all good or all bad. It’s very likely that whether it’s net good or net bad depends on a combination of factors.”
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Here are 3 ways coffee can affect your heart:
1. Irregular heart beat
The study found no evidence that coffee consumption created any irregular rhythms within the atria, the upper chambers of the heart. That’s good news since one of the major medical concerns about coffee has been whether it might promote atrial fibrillation, a potentially dangerous condition.
But they did find that coffee consumption could cause the