The New 5-A-Day? Heart Docs Say Up to Five Coffees Is Fine

An American Heart Association report Monday pronouncing up to five cups of coffee a day safe for most adults has been welcomed across camps including new parents, office workaholics, shift workers and The Sun’s own ink-stained wretches. The statement, published in the association’s medical journal, Circulation, pointed to research indicating that consuming up to 400 mg of caffeine per day in black coffee even appears to be associated with decreased risk of conditions including heart failure, heart disease, stroke and type-2 diabetes. But before you start shotgunning La Colombe canned lattes, spare a thought for your body’s other systems, starting with your teeth.Your smile could suffer on more than about two cups a day, according to the professionals at Arizona-based Saba & Chiappetti Dental Associates. The risk boils down to coffee’s combination of acid, which weakens enamel; tannins that stain the weakened tooth; and caffeine, which delays healing.“High doses of caffeine can inhibit healing or cell growth in the gums. It may also harm bone support for your teeth. That means if you’re recovering from a tooth extraction and/or bone grafting, excess caffeine could slow down or prevent you from healing properly,” Saba and Chiappetti said in a recent blog post.Orthopedists have gone back and forth on caffeine’s relationship with bone health in recent years, but a meta-analysis published in Frontiers in Nutrition last year found that drinking more than one cup of coffee or tea per day appeared to reduce the risk of osteoporosis.Excess caffeine consumption can also lead to dehydration and all of its unsavory side effects, including older-looking skin, according to dermatologists. However, a 2021 study out of Taiwan found that coffee pulp extract taken as a supplement “comprehensively improved the moisture, brightness, elasticity, spotting, texture, and collagen content of skin for most subjects after 8 weeks.” Applying the extract directly to skin had similar benefits, according to the researchers.As jittery readers may already attest, one thing coffee won’t do is steady your hand, and that includes behind the wheel.A 2020 study of more than 3,000 low- and high-caffeine consuming truck drivers in England and the United States found that not only did the high caffeine consumption not reduce crashes, it was also associated with worse health and more unhealthy behaviors like smoking.“Caffeine is an effective countermeasure to driver sleepiness, however, high caffeine consumers do not exhibit any benefit to driving safety indicators,” the researchers said. “In fact, there is some evidence for safety concern because high caffeine consumers self-report more crashes and worse driving safety indicators than low caffeine consumers,”

The New 5-A-Day? Heart Docs Say Up to Five Coffees Is Fine

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