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Coffee is actually beneficial for your cholesterol levels and heart health\u2026 that is, if you drink the right kind of coffee.<\/p>\nCoffee is actually beneficial for your cholesterol levels and heart health\u2026 that is, if you drink the right kind of coffee.<\/p>\n
Because according to a new study in Nutrition, Metabolism and Cardiovascular Diseases<\/em>, the wrong kind spikes LDL (bad) cholesterol levels and can increase your risk of heart attack by 34%.<\/p>\n Unfortunately, the bad coffee is exactly the one most of us drink too much of.<\/p>\n We already knew that unfiltered coffee\u2014like boiled or French press\u2014contains certain natural oils from coffee beans that raise LDL cholesterol.<\/p>\n These compounds, called cafestol and kahweol, are known as diterpenes. While the health benefits of coffee are often celebrated, these particular substances aren’t part of that story.<\/p>\n The 2023 Nordic nutritional guidelines even recommended limiting unfiltered coffee because of them.<\/p>\n But until now, no one had looked closely at the kind of coffee most of us drink during the workday\u2014namely, coffee from workplace machines.<\/p>\n A research team from Uppsala and Chalmers University decided to investigate coffee from various sources.<\/p>\n First, they collected coffee samples from fourteen different machines in workplace break rooms across several Swedish hospitals.<\/p>\n Then, for comparison, they also tested coffee brewed in different ways at home, including regular paper-filtered coffee, French press, percolator, and traditional Scandinavian boiled coffee.<\/p>\n They even included espresso in their tests.<\/p>\n Using sophisticated lab techniques, they measured exactly how much cafestol and kahweol was in each sample.<\/p>\n This allowed them to compare brewing methods and see which ones effectively filtered out these cholesterol-raising compounds.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s take a look at the results, in milligrams per liter (mg\/L):<\/p>\n 2. Liquid-model machines \u2013 where concentrate is mixed with hot water \u2013 had very low levels (about 8 mg\/L of cafestol and 7 mg\/L of kahweol). These show up in some offices.<\/p>\n 3. Boiled coffee was by far the worst offender, with cafestol levels at 939 mg\/L and kahweol at 678 mg\/L. Running it through a fabric filter brought that down dramatically to 28 mg\/L and 21 mg\/L.<\/p>\n 4. Home paper-filtered drip coffee contained very little\u2014just 12 mg\/L of cafestol and 8 mg\/L of kahweol.<\/p>\n 5. French press and percolator coffees had intermediate levels around 90 mg\/L and 70 mg\/L.<\/p>\n 6. Espresso had a wide range, with some samples reaching over 2,400 mg\/L of cafestol.<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n So, if you\u2019re a coffee lover who drinks several cups a day at work, start bringing your own paper-filtered coffee.<\/p>\n The researchers estimated that replacing just three cups of machine coffee with paper-filtered coffee each day could lower your LDL cholesterol by about 0.58 mmol\/L (millimoles per liter)\u2014potentially reducing your heart disease risk by up to 36% over 40 years.<\/p>\n But there\u2019s another ingredient that\u2019s almost the sole cause of cholesterol plaque buildup in your arteries.<\/p>\n You may not even realize this ingredient exists. But it\u2019s easy to completely cut it out of your diet\u2014as I explain here\u2026<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n