Drinking several cups of coffee each day can help you lose weight by stimulating your body’s “brown fat”, Dr Michael Mosley says. The popular beverage helps the body burn more calories through body heat.
If you’re a coffee drinker you’ll be delighted to hear that your daily habit could actually be helping to keep you slim, Dr Mosley says. In a recent episode of his podcast , Just One Thing, on BBC Radio 4, the nutrition and diet expert explains how the caffeine in coffee has a number of waist-shrinking effects.
But it’s not just as simple as the well-known effects of caffeine, which can help us stay more alert allowing us to exercise for longer and burn more calories. Coffee also triggers our body’s own “fat-fighting defences” that cause us to burn calories through body heat. It also contains compounds with “anti-obesity properties", according to the studies referenced by Dr Mosley.
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During the podcast Dr Mosley said: “Drinking coffee stimulates brown fat, and one of the main functions of brown fat is to generate body heat by burning calories. Other recent research showed that women who drank two to three cups of coffee a day had less total body fat and abdominal fat than those who didn't drink any.”
The first study Dr Mosley references was carried out by the University of Nottingham in 2019. It made the “pioneering” discovery that drinking a cup of coffee stimulates brown adipose tissue, known as brown fat, to “generate body heat by burning calories”. The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports .
With 95 million cups consumed each day in the UK alone, many of us are already on the coffee “diet”. Researchers at the University of Nottingham believe that the powerful effects of the stimulant caffeine could be used to help tackle obesity and diabetes.
Additionally, Dr Mosley references another study by the Anglia Ruskin University, published in The Journal of Nutrition. It found that coffee-drinking women, specifically those who drink two or three cups a day, had a 2.8% lower total body fat percentage than those who drink less.
But you don’t need to spend £3 on a “fancy espresso” four times a day to see the benefits Dr Mosley says. Cheap and cheerful instant coffee has the “same benefits”, he claims.
How many coffees should I drink a day?
On his podcast Just One Thing, Dr Mosley recommends sticking to the “sweet spot” of between three to four coffees a day for the best chance of reaping the health benefits. This will depend on your age and size. Any more than five coffees a day and you may start to suffer from the diuretic effects and become dehydrated, the diet expert warns.
This amount will be far less for pregnant women. Coffee drinkers should also be aware that caffeine can disrupt your sleep and cause your blood pressure to spike, Dr Mosley warns.
Should I drink coffee before a workout?
Drinking coffee is a great way to boost your athletic performance, Dr Mosley tells his podcast listeners. The benefits include increasing the amount of fat you burn whilst exercising, and improving endurance so you can workout for longer stints.
Dr James Betts, a Professor of Metabolic Physiology at the University of Bath, told BBC’s Just One Thing : “Despite the number of supplements athletes may take, I genuinely feel you can count on one hand the things that actually work and I put caffeine on top of that list both for the size of effect that you get, and the breadth. Most events require a combination of speed, scale, endurance, strength, and caffeine seems to tick all the boxes.”
Drinking a coffee within one hour before your workout is optimum for calorie burning, Dr Betts said. If possible try to consume coffee after your first meal of the day, so your body’s glucose levels don’t become unbalanced - which can be a negative side effect of caffeine.
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