
The surprising health benefits of coffee
November 3, 2014
Why travellers prefer Blue Cross
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Many Canadians welcome the start of their morning with the scent of a freshly brewing pot of coffee. For some of us, the day doesn’t start until we’ve our first cup. Regardless of whether you make it at home or pick one up at a coffee shop, it is a morning staple for millions of us across the country.
Just how much of an impact does coffee have on a typical Canadian’s day? A 2010 Canadian coffee drinking study by the Coffee Association of Canada found that we love our coffee. Specifically, here is what the study found:
There is a variety of reasons why people love coffee. We love the flavour and we love the energy boost it provides, but we should also love it for its health benefits. In fact, drinking coffee offers more health benefits than most people realize. Here are the general health benefits of drinking coffee:
As outlined in Coffee and Your Health, multiple studies have found that coffee has the ability to help protect against and prevent many common diseases. It is known to help protect against stroke, cardiovascular disease, Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease and type 2 diabetes, and it has anti-cancer properties.
“There is certainly much more good news than bad news, in terms of coffee and health,” says Frank Hu, MD, MPH, PhD, nutrition and epidemiology professor at the Harvard School of Public Health.
These studies need to be taken with caution. Coffee has not been proven to prevent these conditions, but it can help serve as a preventative measure.
As they say, you can have too much of a good thing, and coffee, like other foods and beverages, is best consumed in moderation. The two main issues with coffee drinkers today are that they drink too much coffee, and they fill their cups with fatty and sugary additives.
All of the benefits mentioned above are based on drinking coffee black. However, most of us are guilty of adding things that ramp up the calories in our coffee.
You can easily turn your low-calorie coffee into an empty-calorie, sugar-filled drink. A teaspoon of sugar is approximately 15 calories. A serving of half-and-half cream or creamer is about 50 calories, making that double-double amount to about 150 calories or more.
What you put in your coffee matters. The good news is there are a number of healthy and tasty alternatives to ensure your coffee is healthy, including:
Drinking coffee offers multiple benefits for Canadians, giving us another reason to love our morning coffee. Do you drink coffee? How do you take it?
Part of a healthy lifestyle is protecting yourself with supplemental health insurance plans. Get health insurance FAQs or a free quote today.