If you have high blood pressure, bad cholesterol, or heart ailments, should you drink coffee?  No one really knows for sure how beneficial or harmful coffee is, so it is hard to say.  Without more conclusive evidence, it comes down to a personal choice. 

Some experts believe that coffee is bad for your health because it can lead to heart disease, hypertension, cancer and addiction.  Other experts believe that coffee is a wonderful antioxidant which can improve or repair cells in our bodies and can lower our bad cholesterol.  In every research study we reviewed, all seemed to indicate, however, that if you had high blood pressure to stay away from caffeinated coffee - except one study.

This study - released in April 2006 and conducted by Dr. Richard Stein, a cardiologist and spokesperson for the American Heart Association - followed 120,000 people between 14 and 20 years and discovered that people who drank as much as six cups per day, compared with people who drank less than one cup a month, showed no difference in the incidence of heart disease.

What we do know about coffee is that chemicals and carcinogens occur naturally in the making of coffee.  They include:  acetaldehyde, acetic acid, acetone, atractylosides, butanol, cafestol, palmitate, chlorogenic acid, dimethyl sulfide, eithanol, furan, furfural, guaiacol, hydrogen sulfide, isoprene, methyl, glyoxal, propionaldehyde, pyridine and 1,3,7,-trimethylxanthine.

If you buy non-organic coffee, there is a good chance that you will also be drinking trace amounts of pesticides and other chemicals.  Consuming coffee moderately, however, does not elevate a person’s risk of developing cancer, because our body detoxifies small doses of these chemicals found in food.

There is a debate between filtered and non-filtered coffee and decaf and caffeinated coffee.  Most of the research is still inconclusive, but what we do know based on the extensive research already done is that coffee affects people differently; like everything else, what might be good for you might not be so good for someone else.