Coffee, Tea, and Thee

For those who enjoy “pick me up” beverages, some are coffee people, some prefer tea, and some alternate between the two, but is one better than the other in terms of long-term health and longevity?

For a while, many health experts advised to avoid coffee altogether, but that position has largely been abandoned in the face of ongoing research showing that it contains several compounds that have potential health benefits.

There’s been some disagreement over the relative health benefits of consuming coffee and tea, often due to evaluation of various specific components that vary between the two. This had led to some controversy concerning the relative “healthiness” of coffee versus tea.

A recent large, long-term study (nearly 500,000 participants with their coffee/tea consumption and health stats tracked for over 15 years) sheds quite a bit of light on the subject.

Coffee and tea both contain caffeine – with coffee being substantially higher in caffeine content. Both also contain antioxidants and other beneficial compounds, but the specific ones vary between the two. But when looking at coffee and tea in general, both have some potentially healthful qualities, although they’re probably more healthy when consumed relatively plain, as opposed to something like a Starbucks Mocha Cookie Crumble Frappuccino (yes, that’s a real thing)!

If we look at pretty basic coffee and tea beverages, the study findings on longevity and with regards to a few specific areas of health, such as cardiovascular disease and digestive disorders, were pretty similar for lower consumption amounts. With relatively low daily consumption (1 to 3 cups), both coffee and tea drinkers (the study did not distinguish between black and green tea) had lower all-cause mortality than age-matched non-consumers, and both had lower incidence of things like cardiovascular disease.

The differences start to show up when consumption reached 4 cups and more per day. At these higher intakes, tea drinkers maintain some benefits over non-consumers of coffee and tea. Coffee drinkers, on the other hand, lost their advantage and even began to show mild adverse health and longevity effects when consumption was 4 cups or greater.

One thing that may account for the detrimental effects of increased coffee intakes of 4 or more cups per day could be impaired sleep (this was not considered in the study). As mentioned earlier, coffee is considerably higher in caffeine than tea, so higher consumption of coffee, particularly later in the day, would potentially impact sleep quality more than tea. Of course, there is decaf, but only about 15% of U.S. coffee drinkers consume only decaf, so the large majority of coffee drinkers are subject to possible sleep effects from the caffeine.

Poor sleep is recognized as a risk factor for decreased health and longevity, so this might account at least partially for coffee’s adverse effects at higher levels of consumption as compared to tea. The impaired sleep theory is supported by the study finding that tea’s health advantages begin to fall off at extremely high consumption levels of 10 or more cups per day.

Separate from the study, some experts suggest reserving coffee consumption for mornings and then switching to tea (in low amounts) later in the day, if desired, to get the benefits of both without as much risk of poor sleep.

With low to moderate consumption, there really isn’t a clear winner in terms of health and longevity between coffee and tea, so there’s no reason not to enjoy whichever one you prefer – as long as you’re keeping sweeteners and flavorings to a minimum (those are a whole different story!).

If you’re big on coffee, it would probably be a good idea to stick to a max of 3 cups a day (we’re talking about “standard” 6 ounce cups of regular coffee here), preferably consumed in the morning and beyond that switch to decaf for any further coffee consumption. If you need a boost later in the day, I suggest you switch to tea, but even then, I recommend you cut it off by mid-afternoon to minimize and adverse effects on sleep.

Other than that, it just comes down to personal preferences. And to be clear, we’re talking about relatively modest advantages in health and longevity for low to moderate coffee and/or tea consumption. If you don’t enjoy either one, there’s a number of other things you can do to promote a long, healthy life (exercise is top of the list) rather than choking down a beverage you dislike for the sake of being “healthy!”

Until next time…

George F. Best, D.C.