Hypertension: A ‘Brewing’ Issue

It’s the drink that millions of Americans turn to in the morning, noon and night. It’s the drink that millions guzzle down to cool down or sip up to warm up. It’s the drink that makes $19.2 billion in America annually and it’s the drink that more than half of Americans don’t go a day without. Yep, it’s America’s Brew: coffee.

As popular a drink coffee is, there’s a sizeable divide on just how good people feel about drinking it, whether it’s a guilty pleasure or a healthy libation. Some studies suggest regular coffee drinkers are less likely to get Type II diabetes than non-regular coffee drinkers. Others suggest coffee improves short term memory, diminishes the effects of asthma and prevents degenerative diseases from forming like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s. But a recently released study throws a wrench into the forecast of improved health percolating inside Americans’ coffee cups.

According to a study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, hypertension (i.e. high blood pressure)—a disease the American Heart Association says one in three Americans have, that killed over 54,000 people in 2004, and that an estimated 30 percent of Americans don’t realize they have—has been linked to drinking coffee.

As reported by Reuters, researchers from the National Public Health Institute in Finland conducted a 13-year study that followed approximately 25,000 Finnish residents between the ages of 25 and 64, all of whom had no prior cardiovascular-related medical issues. Throughout those 13 years, the participants that drank coffee were asked to keep track of their coffee consumption by writing down when and how much coffee they had per day in a provided questionnaire. By the study’s end, more than 2,500 coffee drinkers had to begin taking an anti-hypertensive drug, leading researchers to believe that those who abstained from coffee were less likely to get hypertension than those who drank even moderate amounts of it (there was no significant difference in acquiring hypertension based on how much or how little the participants drank coffee).

Now, like virtually all of these studies, more research needs to be done before anything definitive can be reported to the medical world. In fact, the researchers who conducted the survey corroborated the aforementioned findings that coffee reduces the risk of acquiring Type II diabetes, leaving yours truly with a dizzying headache on how something can seem both healthy and bad for you at the same time.

Here’s my rule: when in doubt, throw it out. To me, coffee has more side effects than positive attributes (e.g. harmful chemicals found in coffee like Trichloroethylene, decreases liver function, contributes to obesity problems, and depression high amounts of caffeine) and you really ought to try and wean yourself off it if you can.

Going cold turkey would be ideal, but if you can’t do that, look for organically grown coffee beans. They’re free of pesticides and herbicides that not only harm you but the environment as well (by purchasing organically-grown coffee, you’re also making sure that the coffee you buy is fair trade coffee, thereby benefiting the farmers who grow it), buy decaffeinated coffee and try to cut back on how many cups of coffee you drink per day.

It may be a sacrifice, but for the sake of your physical and mental health—particularly your heart’s—it’s a sacrifice worth the effort.