Health benefits of drinking caffeine

There are good reasons to drink coffee.
Drinking coffee every day can help lower your risk of many serious health conditions and even help you feel better. It is loaded with antioxidants and beneficial nutrients that can improve your health.
Here’s a list of some good reasons to drink coffee:
* Coffee raises your metabolism and helps you perform better physically. Studies have shown that drinking coffee can raise your metabolism and help you burn fat at a faster rate, thus positively affecting your weight loss. Caffeine does this by stimulating your nervous system, causing it to send signals to your fat cells to break down body fat.
It also has been shown to improve athletic performance and endurance during exercise. These two reasons alone are enough to encourage you to drink more coffee, especially before heading to the gym.
* Coffee can help prevent diabetes. Diabetes, an enormous health problem everywhere, with over 400 million sufferers, affects about eight per cent of adults over the age of 18 worldwide.
Studies show that people who drink coffee have a significantly lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes. In one study, participants with a total daily consumption of at least three cups of coffee reduced the risk of type 2 diabetes by approximately 42 per cent.
If you’re concerned about diabetes, you may want to start including coffee in your diet on a regular basis, to improve your chances of preventing it. But make sure to limit the amount of sugar you use.
* Coffee can improve energy levels and make you smarter. Coffee can help people feel less tired and increase energy levels. That’s because it contains a stimulant called caffeine, the most commonly consumed psychoactive substance in the world.
After you drink coffee, the caffeine is absorbed into the bloodstream. From there, it travels to the brain. There, caffeine blocks an inhibitory neurotransmitter called adenosine.
When that happens, the amount of norepinephrine and dopamine increases, leading to enhanced firing of neurons.
Many controlled trials in humans show that coffee improves various aspects of brain function. This includes memory, mood, vigilance, energy levels, reaction times and general cognitive function.
Every one of these reasons tends to indicate that you should be drinking more than one cup of coffee a day for the best results.
According to research, it’s recommended that adults should consume three to four cups of coffee a day, to realise the most health benefits.
* Information obtained from www.authoritynutrition.com, www.loseweightbyeating.com and www.medicalnewstoday.com.