No Arrhythmia Risk from Coffee: Title of World’s Greatest Beverage Unchallenged

Let’s just call it a health food at this point.

Welcome to Impact Factor, your weekly dose of commentary on a new medical study. I’m Dr. F. Perry Wilson of the Yale School of Medicine.

There’s a near truism in dietary science that anything that is too pleasurable is probably not good for you. It holds for ultra-processed foods, refined sugars, alcohol. But there is one stubborn hold out to this trend. One thing you can ingest that provides both pleasure, and, in study after study, health benefits. It’s sort of a unicorn. I’m speaking, of course, of coffee.

Coffee has come a long way since being falsely implicated in causing stomach ulcers or nervous exhaustion. In fact, newer studies have highlighted that coffee drinking is associated with a decreased risk of cancer, diabetes, even overall mortality. You could almost argue it’s a heath food.

Nevertheless, some guideline-making societies have recommended avoiding coffee to certain individuals because it might promote cardiac arrhythmia.

This is in the medical zeitgeist. Coffee makes your heart race. Coffee gives you palpitations. But does it? Or, more meaningfully, does it have any long-term consequences? This study, appearing…