Dr. Rhonda Patrick

There's a bit of a twist here because coffee can acutely raise fasting blood glucose in some individuals and may slightly decrease insulin sensitivity in the short term, largely via acute sympathetic activation.

But the overall long-term effect is protective.

It improves glucose tolerance, reduces triglyceride levels, and lowers long-term diabetes risk.

So coffee seems to make our metabolic machinery healthier, more responsive, and better able to protect itself against age-related metabolic disease.

Believe it or not, coffee used to be labeled a potential carcinogen from the 1990s to about 2016.

That was wrong.

The label rested on weak, confounded evidence.

But acrylamide was really at the heart of it.

Acrylamide is a chemical form naturally when coffee beans are roasted, as well as during the cooking of starchy foods at high temperatures.

Although acrylamide has caused cancer in lab animals at very high doses,

The levels typically found in coffee pose a minimal risk to humans.

One standard brewed cup delivers roughly two to five micrograms of acrylamide.

You'd need to drink 25 to 50 cups a day to hit the conservative reference level, which is around two micrograms per kilogram body weight per day.

What we now know is that coffee does not increase your cancer risk.

In fact, it probably reduces it, particularly for certain major cancers, including liver cancer, endometrial cancer, and skin cancer.

The evidence here is compelling.

Each daily cup of coffee you drink is associated with roughly a 15% to 20% reduction in liver cancer risk and about a 10% lower risk of endometrial cancer, with maximum benefits seen around four to five cups per day.

Even the International Agency for Research on Cancer recently acknowledged coffee's protective role, officially removing coffee from their list of possible carcinogens.

Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the United States, and it is the leading cause of death in Canada, Japan, and many Western European Union states.

So it is important to pay attention to.