Coffee is second only to tea as the world’s most popular drink. Many of you may have a cup in your hand as you read this and will be relieved to hear that a study announced this week, part-funded by the British Heart Foundation and conducted by researchers at the Queen Mary University of London, found that even drinking up to 25 cups of coffee a day was no more likely to cause a stiffening of arteries than drinking no coffee at all.
Good news! But not very new news. Possibly because we drink so much of it, coffee has been the subject of an enormous number of studies into its effect on our health. Coffee, it turns out, does not cause cancer, incontinence, brittle bones, dehydration, gallstones, liver damage, dementia or even — as once supposed due to its acridity — stomach ulcers.
In fact most of the recent studies have noted its health benefits. Drinking coffee is now said to protect against Parkinson’s, liver disease and type 2 diabetes. It also has been shown to improve cognitive function, decrease the risk of depression and possibly stave off Alzheimer’s.
Caffeine works by blocking the effects of adenosine, a brain chemical that makes you feel tired, while triggering the release of adrenalin, the “fight-or-flight” hormone. It keeps you alert. These properties can also make it hard to get to sleep, raise your heartbeat and exacerbate anxiety, but such side effects are temporary and disappear as the caffeine is flushed out of the system.
In Britain we like our coffee milky and sweet; more dangerous than the coffee itself is all the sugar we put in it. (We sweeten our coffee more than we sweeten our tea, probably because its more acidic.) Some speciality confections, like a white chocolate mocha topped with syrup and whipped cream, and caramel lattes, are loaded with more sugar than a can of coke.
Unfortunately espresso is a continental habit that hasn’t quite caught on in Britain. If we could take our coffee black, it could even be judged medicinal. The most recent research shows that caffeine stimulates our mitochondria — considered the power generators of cells — which increases the functional capacity of cells that line our blood vessels. Coffee is good for us. Maybe we should be taking it prophylactically, like aspirin?
For the moment, Britain is still a nation of tea drinkers. But tea drinking is in decline and coffee consumption has grown over the past 20 years.
The growth has come from the rise of coffee shops. Independent shops and high street chains like Starbucks and Costa have become places to meet friends and colleagues, work on a laptop, or just sit down for a breather and use the facilities.
Coffee shops are not a new phenomenon, however. They came to Europe from the Muslim world in the 17th century, carried by the trading powers of Malta and Venice. London’s first coffee house was opened in 1652 by a Greek employee of the Levant Company, which traded with the Ottoman Empire.
By 1700 there were around 550 coffee houses in the City of London — a far higher density than today’s coffee shops relative to population. They were hotbeds of the Enlightenment, where the conviviality and vitality of coffee drinking encouraged new ideas: the insurance industry, stockbroking, newspapers, political parties. For a penny, the price of a coffee, anyone could enter.
In the Middle East (between its wars) I’ve often seen cafés serve the same function: a neutral place without alcohol where rich and poor, people with different politics and beliefs and even women could meet.
Coffee delivers not only a health benefit, but a social benefit too. Perhaps it is not surprising that the Scandinavians — those perennial champions of so many indices for health, social welfare and democracy — also lead the world tables in per capita coffee consumption.
The writer is author of a novel, ‘Paris Metro’