Coffee and coronary heart disease: a review

Since the early 1900s, coffee has been implicated as having adverse effects on human health. Recent attention has focused on coffee's relation to CHD, but because of conflicting results of epidemiologic studies on coffee and CHD mortality, attention has turned to the effects of coffee and caffeine on individual CHD risk factors. Coffee's effect on serum lipids does not appear to be due to caffeine. If in fact an adverse effect on lipids exists, it may be related to other factors including biochemical constituents other than caffeine, hardness of the water used in preparation, and the method of preparation, filtered coffee having no effect. The data are fairly convincing that chronic coffee ingestion does not induce hypertension, although acute consumption produces a small, short-lived increase in BP. The least well understood effect of coffee is its potential to induce cardiac arrhythmias, including potentially lethal ventricular ectopy in certain individuals. More work is needed in this area of arrhythmias before any concrete recommendations can be made. Until more convincing evidence against coffee is compiled, it appears that, at least in moderate amounts in otherwise healthy persons, coffee is a safe beverage.