Is Coffee Good for You or Bad for You?
☕️ Coffee Culture
Our perception on coffee more or less will be influenced by our culture, habits and our lifestyle.
If you have worked in an Italian company, you will know how much the Italians love coffee. The first thing they will do in office is having a cup of Espresso. Of course, after lunch coffee and coffee break at around 4:00pm is a must and it is their daily routine.
In Hong Kong, our historic relationship with Tea is stronger than coffee, our parents will go to Chinese restaurant everyday to drink tea and have some Dimsum. Without doubt, we are also influenced by this tradition. However, the lifestyle has been changing, the trend of drinking coffee has been growing tremendously in the last 10 years. Nowadays, Hong Kong has also got a vibrant and diverse coffee culture as the culture has been influencing by other Asia Pacific countries including Taiwan and Japan. In fact, Hong Kong is crazy about coffee as you can see in the endless openings of new coffee shops. Coffee shop is a place for study, work and socialising place.
People with strong cultural background or influenced by lifestyle trend will have positive comments or image towards coffee.
The next question that we need to ask is whether coffee is good for you or bad for you. To answer this question, we need to look at it objectively by reviewing some scientific studies.
Coffee’s health concerns in early studies
Early studies of coffee suggested that coffee could lead to health problem. In excess of caffeine intake, coffee can make you anxious as caffeine stimulates the release of adrenaline from the adrenal glands. With the regular intake of caffeine, your body can get used to the energy boost and feel crappy when you miss out.
This health concerns are controversial and a lot more recent studies have different conclusions
Coffee’s health benefits in recent studies
Recent research provides strong evidence that drinking coffee actually has a variety of health benefits.
“The overall evidence has been pretty convincing that coffee has been more healthful than harmful in terms of health outcomes,” said Frank Hu, chair of the Department of Nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, in an April 5, 2021, article in Discover. “For most people, moderate coffee consumption can be incorporated into a healthy diet.”
Hu said that moderate coffee intake—about 2–5 cups a day—is linked to a lower likelihood of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, liver and endometrial cancers, Parkinson’s disease, and depression. It’s even possible that people who drink coffee can reduce their risk of early death.
Alertness, attention, reaction time and attention is improved with low to moderate (~300mg or 4 mg per kg) caffeine does consumption, according to a study published in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews in 2016.
The antioxidants found in coffee is thought to have strong association to the decreases in chronic disease and cancer risk.
Drinking two to three cups of coffee a day is linked to a lower risk of heart disease and dangerous arrhythmias, concluded a 10-year American College of Cardiology study that looked at more than half a million people.
Good for health and Bad for money
Coffee has some pretty good things related to health. An interesting study has conducted and the focus was not on health but related to the influence of coffee towards consumer behaviour. The study shift the direction towards whether our purchase is influenced by coffee consumption. The study has been first published in Journal of Marketing on June 11, 2022.
In the first study, the team set up an espresso station over four days at a large chain store selling household product in France. Each day, some shoppers were offering espresso with caffeine and some were given decaf. Those shoppers were requested to do two things, they need to give their purchase receipt to the team after their purchase to record their purchase amount and the transactions they have. They also need to answer some questions on how excited, alert and sleepy they felt during their shopping.
The second study was replicated in Spain and the third one went back in France with the same procedure. The findings were consistent among the three studies, drinking with a caffeinated coffee before shopping led to greater spending and a greater number of purchases.
In a final study, participants drank caffeinated drinks bought less useful objects such as notebooks and diaries but more “exciting” stuff.
The findings are a good news to the marketer of retailers. Apart from their expensive Marketing campaign to drive revenue, they can now have more tools to influence consumer behaviour by having a coffee station before consumers enter their shop. They can utilise this freebies to increase their consumers basket size and transaction value. Not only the total spending might be increased, but also consumer enjoyment would be enhanced.
The marketers can leverage the support from big coffee companies to have joint support to lower their cost which make the campaign more cost effective.
On an individual basis, you have to watch out the impact of caffeine on spending in particular if you are struggling with your spending. The one thing that you can avoid is drinking coffee before shopping and beware of the free coffee counter in future.