Why your morning cup of coffee is great for your health. Coffee isn’t just warm and energising, it may also be extremely good for you.

Cardiologists have long cautioned patients with atrial fibrillation against caffeine, but new evidence has transformed the experts’ advice.

That daily cup of coffee helps to boost your memory, relieve stress and even stave off cancer, the research suggests. A new study published by the International Journal of Cancer shows that coffee drinking led to a decreased risk of developing brain cancer.

Despite previously being blamed for a whole host of health issues – from halitosis to insomnia – new research suggests that coffee can cut your risk of cancer, relieve stress and improve your memory.

Research suggests that those coffee beans could actually have a whole host of heart benefits, from the discovery that they can reduce an irregular heartbeat, to more established connections to weight loss and reduced blood pressure.

Drinking coffee may protect a jittery heart
The latest – and possibly most unexpected – discovery is that drinking coffee may protect against atrial fibrillation (AF), a heart rhythm disorder that causes irregular heartbeats, which affects one in three of us, and if left untreated can lead to heart failure and dementia.

Consultant cardiologist Christopher Wong, one of the lead researchers on the randomised trial, and professor of cardiology at the University of Adelaide, Australia, says: “For years, cardiologists have routinely recommended coffee reduction and abstention to those with AF because caffeine is a stimulant, so we had assumed it could cause racing, irregular beats.”

Wong led a “coin-flip” trial of 200 patients awaiting treatment for AF that randomly allocated half of participants to drink at least one coffee a day, while the other half were asked to avoid it completely.

“Our results flew in the opposite direction, revealing that patients with persistent irregular heartbeats who drank coffee daily had a significantly lower risk – 17 per cent lower – of their AF recurring than those who abstained, and went longer before their first episode occurred.

So how does he explain these newfound benefits? It could be down to “a drop in blood pressure due to coffee’s diuretic properties, to making you more active”, Wong says. He adds that AF patients can now be advised that at least one coffee a day is safe to drink.