How Much Caffeine Is Safe for Your Heart? Here’s the Explanation

drink coffee illustration
drink coffee illustration

Elfatica.com – As we know now, there are many coffee shops or cafes that provide various types of coffee and its mixtures. It’s delicious when we drink coffee, especially while chatting with our colleagues or friends. But has it ever crossed our minds; Is drinking coffee safe for our health, especially the heart? So, in this article, we will discuss how it affects and how much coffee we can consume.

Coffee, An Encouraging Drink to Accompany Us

Speaking of coffee, of course many of us like it and even rely on it to help us get through the day. And from the content in the coffee there is a substance in coffee that helps us do that, namely caffeine.

drink coffee illustration
drink coffee illustration. image credits: tastingtable.com

Caffeine can be found in coffee, soda, chocolate, energy drinks and many other drinks. And you know that drinking or eating a lot of caffeine might actually hurt your liver. So, we have to be able to find out how much caffeine we can consume and be accepted by the heart. Don’t drink too much caffeine that causes you to have heart disease.

Caffeine, An Exciting Substance That Can Hurt the Heart

When we drink a cup of coffee, we also drink about 100 milligrams of caffeine. However, it turns out that our bodies all respond to caffeine differently. That means that each time we drink it, the amount of time it takes for our bodies to break down the caffeine varies. This is as explained by Roshini Malaney, a board-certified cardiologist at Manhattan Cardiology in New York City. Roshini said that the average maximum concentration of caffeine in our body usually reaches its peak one hour after eating or drinking something caffeinated. However, any effect on the cardiovascular system can last between 10 and 60 hours. And because our bodies are different, the effects of the caffeine we drink on our health also differ from person to person. It depends on how much we drink it, where it comes from and how often we drink it.

What is the Safe Caffeine Limit for the Heart?

If caffeine will break down differently from person to person, isn’t there a standard rule about the amount of coffee you should drink? In this case Dr. Malaney says that the best thing to drink coffee is two cups a day. Or less than two cups of course. When we drink more than four cups of coffee a day, our heart will feel the effects of the caffeine. So as a reference it is better for us to keep the caffeine content that we consume below the limit of four hundred grams. Whether it’s in the form of coffee, energy drinks, soda, chocolate or something else. Therefore, it would be nice to check the amount of caffeine in our drinks and food before we consume them. If we were to use a smaller cup for coffee, we would probably be drinking less than 100 milligrams in one cup. And if we keep our caffeine intake under four hundred milligrams, ideally two hundred or less, you should be fine.

Effects of Caffeine on Health

The substance caffeine has different effects on our health. First of all it will increase our blood pressure. “Caffeine stimulates sympathetic activity in our brain, which is our fight or flight response. This ultimately causes our blood vessels to constrict,” says Dr. Malaney as quoted from Real Simple. But it will also increase our cholesterol levels. Especially the non-filter type. So, there’s plenty of reason to keep track of our coffee intake and maybe lower it a bit if we’re concerned about our health. Small amounts have not been shown to have the same effect so luckily you don’t need to give up coffee forever. So in simple terms, we must limit the amount of caffeine that enters our bodies if we want our hearts to stay healthy.

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