This Is the Healthiest Way to Drink Coffee

Tamara Palmer

June 18, 2021

Photo Credit: Helen Yin

Let’s have a little coffee talk, shall we? The debate about whether coffee is healthy or not may never be settled, but there is mounting evidence that how you brew your coffee — and how the beans were roasted in the first place — may make a substantial difference in the potential health benefits. In other words, if you want to drink the healthiest coffee you can, here’s what researchers around the globe have found.

Filtered Coffee Is Better Than Unfiltered Coffee

An impressingly comprehensive and decades-long study followed more than half a million men and women from ages 20 to 79. Their goal? To determine if drinking filtered or unfiltered coffee has a greater effect on death and cardiovascular mortality. And the results, published recently by Norwegian researchers in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, were clear: Participants who drank unfiltered coffee had a higher mortality rate than those who drank filtered coffee. What’s more filtered coffee drinkers had a lower mortality rate than those who didn’t drink coffee at all.

“Unfiltered coffee contains substances which increase blood cholesterol,” University of Gothenburg researcher and study co-author Dag Thelle wrote. “Using a filter removes these and makes heart attacks and premature death less likely.”

Sounds like a good reason to drink filtered coffee!

Light Roast Is Better Than Dark Roast

In another study, this one published in the Journal of Medicinal Food, researchers from three universities in Korea explored light roast and dark roast coffee. They found that caffeine levels were the same, but that there was greater antioxidant and anti-inflammatory activity with drinkers of light roast coffee. Those who drank dark roast coffee saw a decrease in those beneficial activities.

If you’re more of a dark roast drinker, this might be a reason to switch it up a little.