Are coffee and green tea good for my heart?
There are a number of foods and drinks that we commonly take in and people wonder if they are healthy or not healthy for their hearts. Many of these contain compounds that we've hoped would be helpful.For example, antioxidants in teas and flavanoids in multiple different foods and products. Are those really healthy for the heart ? There are speculative mechanisms by which they might be. But in fact, we don't really have sufficient data to say, as yet. The trials of antioxidants,where we've actually given people with heart disease, antioxidants, or people at high risk, antioxidants, haven't shown a benefit. And we've done that in thousands of people now, over many years and the benefit still hasn't emerged. So it looks as though at least in that setting, giving an antioxidant doesn't seem to help much. Again it doesn't seem to harm on the other hand. So if it doesn't harm and it's the food that you like , no reason not to take it. But you wouldn't want to feel that you could avoid the other things , you should be doing to control your risk factors and feel that you could count on a food or drink like green tea that has antioxidants and hope that it would protect your heart. In terms of coffee people often worry that coffee will be bad for their heart, because for many years we actually forbade people from drinking it in coronary carians. And then studies were done that showed, that in fact drinking coffee, even in the early days after a heart attack wasn't harmful and didn't increase your risk of having serious heart rythm problems. So while coffee in someone who never drinks coffee will raise the blood pressure just a little, by the time you are at the second or third day of drinking your regular coffee, it has very little or any effect and is certainly OK for people to drink who have heart disease .
