Decaffeinated vs. Regular Coffee
The good news is that many of coffee’s health benefits can still be found in decaffeinated coffee, says Luis Rustveld, a registered dietitian and assistant professor of family and community medicine at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas. As Rustveld notes, coffee contains a range of beneficial compounds, many of which remain even after the caffeine is removed.
This is believed to be due to the high antioxidant content of coffee beans, many of which remain even after the caffeine has been removed.
“There are different ways to remove caffeine, but overall, when you look at the chemicals in the coffee bean itself, it seems like there are still some protective benefits,” says Dolores Wood, a registered dietitian at the University of Texas Health Science Center’s School of Public Health in Houston, Texas.
Depending on how the caffeine is removed from the coffee beans, this may reduce the amount of antioxidants compared to regular coffeeHowever, overall levels are still high, and coffee is an critical source of antioxidants in the diet for many people.
(Four Popular Decaf Coffee Preparation Methods and How They Compare Their Health Benefits.)
This could translate into real benefits for decaffeinated coffee drinkers. 2014 meta-analysis From 28 different studies, researchers found that both decaf and regular coffee drinkers had a lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes. The more coffee a person drinks in a day, the lower their risk of developing the disease.
Pros and cons of caffeine
IN Study 2022 Published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, researchers tracked the health outcomes of 449,563 participants for 12.5 years, examining the incidence of cardiovascular disease in coffee drinkers compared with non-coffee drinkers. They found a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease and death in all coffee drinkers, including those who drank decaffeinated coffee.
One of the main differences the researchers found was that decaffeinated coffee was not associated with a reduction in arrhythmia. That may be because caffeine has a stabilizing effect on heart rhythm by blocking adenosine receptors, says Peter Kistler, a cardiologist at the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute at The Alfred, a hospital in Melbourne, Australia.
As a result, the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology have issued recommendation that Doctors should stop telling patients to stop drinking coffee—which they did a long time ago because of concerns that it might be related to atrial fibrillation.
