Why You Should Take More Than Three Cups a Day – Health Benefits of Drinking Coffee

Like other beverages coffee ranks top as one of the people’s choice worldwide. But right from day one we human have always asked questions to know if something is really good for us or it isn’t. Well, Coffee can make you a little bit hyper as well as help you power through a slow, dragging day meeting, but the questions still remain what exactly is coffee doing to our insides? A new post on PLOS Biology attempts to answer part of that question, and the results are fantastic news for coffee fanatics.

Earlier research has been carried out to unravel the mystery around coffee and various ailments and health events such as diabetes and heart attack. This research has so far demonstrated that significant caffeine intake can lower the chances of those conditions, as well as stroke, and now scientists think they might know why that is.

Biologists from the University of Dusseldorf who carried out a study on this came with an exciting discovering which shows that moderate coffee drinking can actually increase the uptake levels of a certain protein into the mitochondria of human heart cells. In other words, caffeine makes heart cells better at what they do, and can even make older cells perform as well as younger ones.

They used rats as subjects to carry out the test which clearly proved that the hearts cells of the older caffeinated rats were just as efficient as younger rats. This is an incredibly positive effect, but it gets even better: When the rats were given artificial “heart attacks” by the researchers, the hearts of the caffeinated rodents appeared to be better at mobilizing cells that can repair and rebuild damage.

No doubt that this is indeed an amazing news for people out there who usually start their day with some cup of coffee, but the researchers are quick to note that binging on caffeine could possibly have significant drawbacks. Overdoing your caffeine intake could have other negative effects that are yet to be documented and, most troublingly, tumors actually thrive on the kind of blood vessel growth that caffeine seems to promote. Still, if you feel like downing a few cups of coffee, you don’t have to feel bad about it.