10 Compelling Reasons to Drink Coffee

Coffee is a wonderful tool. Yes, coffee is a tool, a tool that keeps you and your co-workers from murdering each other in the workplace. See isn’t coffee great. In the early morning when nobody wants to get up, a great cup of coffee has a mysterious way of making the people around you less irritating. After National Drink a Beer Day (or three, or sixteen), we doubt you need reasons to drink coffee as you drag yourself out of bed. In addition to that whole preventing workplace violence and curing hangovers, we have ten more reasons why you should drink coffee. Energy.The blatant obvious number one reason is the energy spike that coffee gives. We can all thank the wonderful powers of caffeine for this attribute of coffee. Your average cup of coffee, between 8 and 12 ounces contains around 95-150 mg of caffeine. How much coffee do you need to make it through your day? Well, the truth is probably not as much as you’d think. One cup of Joe should get you through most of your day as, after five hours, you’ll still have half of the original amount of caffeine in your system. Don’t believe us? Check out the facts!

1. Health Benefits

Coffee has health benefits? Yes, curious reader, it does! Much like green tea coffee is chock full of antioxidants and minerals. Coffee is a great drink of choice when supposedly everything else you drink will give you cancer. From Parkinson’s disease to Type 2 Diabetes coffee has a plethora of medical benefits that many of us haven’t even heard of. We suggest you drink more and more, just go easy on the cream and sugar, that won’t prevent diabetes from getting you.

2. Pre-workout

Too many pre-workout drinks make people feel all jittery and anxious, the niacin rush they get makes them feel uncomfortable and itchy. However, our friend coffee, won’t do that to you. A cup of coffee about an hour before your workout should give you all the energy you need. Whether you’re powering through a brutal leg day, or it’s your fifth chest day this week, coffee is a healthy alternative to some of the sugar and vitamin B3 overload that a regular pre-workout supplement may give you. There’s quite a bit more on what coffee can help you with here, but make sure you drink the coffee before your workout and not after.

3. Not a diuretic

Long-held beliefs that coffee will dehydrate you because of the diuretic properties can now be put to rest. If you’re trying to stay hydrated, we don’t suggest you drink only coffee, but the occasional cup is not going to kill your hydration status. New research from the United Kingdom suggests that coffee can actually help with hydration levels. As much as water is the be-all-end-all go-to for staying hydrated, we all know drinking tons of water throughout the day can get a bit boring. After all, water tastes like water, which is like nothing. If you’re looking to break up the monotony of the taste of water a few cups of coffee here and there definitely won’t hurt.

4. Anti-Depressant

Many people attribute the caffeine in coffee to all the benefits, however, in this instance, it quite simply isn’t the case. In fact, Coca-Cola which is also high in caffeine (and tons of sugar) seemed to have a depressing effect on people whereas coffee had the opposite. But why, you ask. Simple. It’s those anti-oxidants again, destroying free-radicals and keeping even your brain functioning optimally as well. Don’t believe us? Read the research for yourself!

5. Coffee Drinkers Are Smarter, No Really!

This one we can attribute to caffeine. When your body takes in caffeine it allows us to have a more efficient brain, increasing our logical thinking, reaction time as well as many other things associated with intelligence. So coffee it up, debate team heroes. You’ll be blasting your opponents out of the water with your totally legal hidden trick.

6. Better Athlete

Yes, we’ve already talked about its ability to help you as a pre-workout. When it comes to game time a cup of coffee at roughly the same interval before the game can help enhance reflexes, decision-making, and overall cognitive processing. Coffee will also increase your endurance as it helps release fatty acids into the bloodstream. The basic scientific explanation is that the more free fatty acids you have floating around, the more they can be turned into the energy substrate ATP, which is your bodies energy currency.

7. Suicide Prevention

Due to the antidepressant nature of coffee, research has shown that coffee drinkers are up to 50 times less likely to commit suicide. In addition to the anti-oxidants that coffee contains, it helps increase the release of neurotransmitters like serotonin, dopamine, and noradrenaline. Harvard School of Public Health did the study and came to the conclusion, so we think it’s a pretty legit source.

8. Less Headaches

Caffeine is a vasoconstrictor. Fancy word right? All it means is that it shrinks our blood vessels. Headaches occur when the blood vessels in our head start to enlarge, putting pressure on all our important facilities up there. You know things that help us breathe and see. Mildly important, right? According to the National Headache Foundation (yes, that’s a real thing) too much caffeine can trigger what is called caffeine rebound headaches as well, so be careful not to consume usually more than 200 mg of caffeine a day.

9. Prevent Skin Cancer

This one is, for the ladies. According to new research, women who consume two to three cups of coffee a day are at a significantly lower risk to develop skin cancer. Don’t ask us the science behind this, it's super technical and you can find the entire paper here.

10. Liver Health

If you’re a heavy drinker and you don’t see your habits changing anytime soon, a few cups of coffee could go far in preventing any sort of liver disease. Researchers have found that drinking four or more cups of coffee a day helps offset and protect the liver from cirrhosis. Your liver is right up there with heart and brain as far as importance in the daily functions of your body, so keeping it healthy should be at a premium, luckily coffee can help you out in that area.