Drinking coffee every morning is better for your health

Here’s a sad story: The other day, my wife and I woke up and realized we were out of coffee.
Honestly, if you want to throw a wrench into the Murphy household and hamper our routine, take away the coffee.
Anyway, the story ends much better; I threw on a baseball hat and drove to the supermarket down the road.
But it also reminded me of a study I’ve wanted to share here, led by researchers at Tulane University who analyzed data on 40,725 Americans and their coffee-drinking habits over nearly a decade.
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In short, they found something remarkable about when people drink their coffee.
Drink it in the morning
The study, supported by the U.S. National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, was published in January in the European Heart Journal. It determined that people who drink coffee primarily in the morning had significantly lower mortality rates than people who either don’t drink coffee at all—or who drink it throughout the entire day.
Examples:
Morning coffee drinkers had a 16% lower risk of dying from any cause during the study period compared with non-coffee drinkers.
They also had a 31% lower risk of dying from cardiovascular disease specifically.
People who drank coffee all day long, by contrast, showed no significant reduction in mortality risk compared with non-coffee drinkers at all.
“Research so far suggests that drinking coffee doesn’t raise the risk of cardiovascular disease, and it seems to lower the risk of some chronic diseases, such as Type 2 diabetes,” said Lu Qi, who led the study at Tulane University’s School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. “Given the effects that caffeine has on our bodies, we wanted to see if the time of day when you drink coffee has any impact on heart health.”
Morning type versus all-day type
The study included adults from the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey between 1999 and 2018. Researchers identified two distinct patterns of coffee drinking among participants:
Morning-type drinkers (36% of participants): People who consumed most or all of their coffee in the morning hours.
All-day-type drinkers (14% of participants): People who spread their coffee consumption throughout the day and evening.
The remaining 50% of participants either didn’t drink coffee or didn’t fit cleanly into either pattern.
Over a median follow-up period of 9.8 years, researchers recorded 4,295 deaths from all causes, 1,268 deaths from cardiovascular disease, and 934 deaths from cancer.
After adjusting for factors like total caffeine intake (both caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee), sleep hours, diet, and other lifestyle variables, the morning-type pattern emerged as significantly protective—while the all-day-type pattern did not.
More coffee, better results—but again, only in the morning
Here’s where it gets even more interesting.
Among morning coffee drinkers, the protective effect increased with the amount of coffee consumed.
People who drank moderate amounts (two to three cups per day) or heavy amounts (more than three cups per day) in the morning showed the strongest associations with lower mortality risk.
But among all-day coffee drinkers, no such association appeared.
Drinking more coffee throughout the day didn’t provide any measurable mortality benefit at all.
“Coffee drinking timing significantly modified the association between coffee intake amounts and all-cause mortality,” the researchers wrote. “Higher coffee intake amounts were significantly associated with a lower risk of all-cause mortality in participants with morning-type pattern but not in those with all-day-type pattern.”
Why timing might matter
The researchers proposed two potential mechanisms to explain their findings.
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First, consuming coffee in the afternoon or evening may disrupt circadian rhythms.
A previous clinical trial found that heavy coffee consumption in the afternoon or evening reduced peak nighttime melatonin production by 30% compared with controls.
Lower melatonin levels have been linked to higher oxidative stress, elevated blood pressure, and increased inflammation—all risk factors for cardiovascular disease.
Second, coffee’s health benefits come largely from anti-inflammatory compounds.
Pro-inflammatory markers in the blood follow a circadian pattern—they’re typically highest in the morning and gradually decline until reaching their lowest levels around 5 p.m.
Therefore, drinking coffee when inflammation is naturally highest may amplify its anti-inflammatory benefits more effectively than spreading consumption throughout the day.
Not the first time
We should acknowledge that this study shows correlation, not causation. It’s possible that morning coffee drinkers have other habits or characteristics researchers didn’t identify that contribute to their longevity.
That said, this study takes its place alongside a growing body of research suggesting that coffee consumption is associated with significant health benefits.
Among them:
A 2018 study of 500,000 people in JAMA Internal Medicine found a clear across-the-board increase in longevity among people who drink lots of coffee.
A 2025 study of 47,513 women from Harvard found that drinking at least one cup of coffee daily was associated with significantly higher odds of “healthy aging”—defined as reaching 70 or older with good mental and physical health, no memory problems, and freedom from 11 major chronic diseases. Every additional cup increased those odds by 2% to 5%.
A study published in 2022 following 171,616 people in Great Britain found that both men and women between ages 37 and 73 who drank 1.5 to 3.5 cups of coffee each day had up to a 30% lower chance of dying from any cause during the seven-year study period.
A 2023 study in the Journal of the American Medical Directors Association that followed 12,583 participants over 20 years found that those who drank copious amounts of coffee were twice as likely to avoid becoming physically frail as they aged into their 70s.
Perhaps most intriguingly, a 2019 study from the University of South Australia analyzing 347,077 coffee drinkers found that health benefits increase with consumption—but only up to about five cups per day.
Beyond that, the risk of heart disease starts to increase.
Head to the market
I’m not going to suggest you should race out and start pounding five cups of coffee before noon.
But for those of us who already drink coffee in the morning—and I don’t think the Murphy household is a rarity at all in this—it’s reassuring.
Just don’t run out. That’s when the drama starts.
And keep a baseball cap near the door, in case you forget and have to make an early shopping trip.
—Bill Murphy Jr.
This article originally appeared on Fast Company’s sister publication, Inc.
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