Study Shows Coffee OK For Heart

Coffee lovers can drink up without fear of increasing their risk of heart disease, according to a major new study that found people could consume as many as six cups a day without upping their risk.

"This is a very large study," says Dr. Richard Stein, a cardiologist and spokesperson for the American Heart Association. He's also director of preventive cardiology at Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan.

"Almost 120,000 people were followed for between 14 and 20 years," he told co-anchor Rene Syler on The Early Show Wednesday. "They carefully answered questions about how much coffee they drink and whether or not they'd had any presentation of heart disease.

"And the answer was dramatically clear: People who drank as much as six cups of coffee a day, versus people who drank less than one cup a month, showed no difference in the incidence of heart disease."

The research even hinted there might be a slight lowering of the risk from six cups a day, but Stein said, "It was a slight decrease in the numbers, but it didn't become statistically significant. So the best answer is, if you enjoy coffee and you drink four to six cups a day, it's not going to cause you heart disease."

The results differ from those of a study less than two years ago that showed even moderate amounts of coffee increased the risk of heart disease. But Stein asserted that, "I think we can close the book on drinking the kind of coffee Americans drink and the way we drink it. This is, you know, more than 100,000 people followed for between 14 and 20 years. This is not going to be a study that's going to be repeated so easily. And the size of it sort of, I think, puts the final nail in (the coffin of doubt)."

The fresh results don't pertain to people who drink so-called French-pressed coffee made with a mesh filter, Stein points out that, "The study was done in the United States. In the U.S., we basically either drip or percolate our coffee, so that's what they studied. The French-pressed coffee or the boiled coffee doesn't have a paper filter in between what you drink and what's coming out of the bean, and there's potentially a difference in certain chemicals between the two. So, it's not that we know that those are bad. We just didn't study them in this study."

Stein stressed there are some people who should stay away from coffee, in any event. They include people who are agitated after they drink it, who have difficulty sleeping, have stomach or abdominal pain or discomfort, or feel the urge to smoke.

"I think people who have in the past had bad feelings, rapid heartbeats, a sense of stress or confusion after having coffee should be advised not to drink it, obviously, if it does that to them," he said. "But for people who drink coffee and enjoy it and feel good, there's no evidence that it's not a reasonably safe thing to do."