Drinking a few cups of coffee each day can improve heart and overall health—but does the timing of your caffeine habit impact its benefits?
It certainly may, according to research published in the European Heart Journal.
The 2025 study—the first to examine the timing of coffee consumption and heart health—found that people who drink coffee in the morning have a lower risk of dying from cardiovascular disease compared to all-day coffee drinkers and non-coffee drinkers.
Morning coffee drinkers also had a lower overall mortality risk than the other groups in the study.
“Our findings indicate that it’s not just whether you drink coffee or how much you drink, but the time of day when you drink coffee that’s important,” senior study author Lu Qi, MD, PhD, HCA Regents Distinguished Chair and professor at the Celia Scott Weatherhead School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine at Tulane University said in a news release.
“We don’t typically give advice about timing in our dietary guidance,” Qi added, “but perhaps we should be thinking about this in the future.”
Previous research has demonstrated coffee’s health benefits, including lowering the risk of type 2 diabetes and not raising the risk of cardiovascular disease. Timing of coffee consumption, however, had yet to be studied.
“Given the effects that caffeine has on our bodies, we wanted to see if the time of day when you drink coffee has any impact on heart health,” Qi said in the news release.
For the study, researchers analyzed data from 40,725 adults who were part of the U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) between 1999 and 2018. The participants were asked about all the food and drinks they consumed in one day—including coffee—and instructed to include how much and when.
Another group of 1,463 adults who had participated in the Women’s and Men’s Lifestyle Validation Study was used to externally validate the coffee-drinking patterns in the NHANES data. Researchers then compared the data to death records over a period of about 10 years.
Of all the participants, 36% primarily drank coffee before noon, 16% drank coffee throughout the day, and 48% were not coffee drinkers.
The results showed that, compared to those who do not drink coffee, morning coffee drinkers were 16% less likely to die of any cause and 31% less likely to die of cardiovascular disease. There was no reduction in risk for all-day coffee drinkers compared to non-coffee drinkers, suggesting that drinking coffee throughout the day was no better than not drinking coffee at all.
Morning coffee drinkers appeared to benefit from the reduced risk regardless of how much they drank, but the association was slightly weaker for light coffee drinkers who consumed one cup or less a day.
While the study controlled for factors like diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol, smoking, physical activity, and more, the research still had limitations.
As an observational study, Qi said the research cannot provide evidence for causality, and more studies are needed in other populations to validate the findings.
The study didn’t offer any explanations as to why drinking coffee in the morning may be the heart-healthier option, but one possibility has to do with how coffee impacts circadian rhythm, Qi said.
Circadian rhythm is the body’s internal clock that regulates when you sleep and wake up, as well as several other key functions. Qi said drinking coffee later in the day may disturb levels of hormones like melatonin, affecting the body’s circadian rhythm and disrupting sleep.
Thomas F. Lüscher, MD, FRCP, consultant cardiologist and director of research, education, and development at Royal Brompton and Harefield Hospitals in the U.K., explained the circadian rhythm connection in an editorial accompanying the study.
“Many all-day [coffee] drinkers suffer from sleep disturbances,” he wrote. “In this context, it is of interest that coffee seems to suppress melatonin, an important sleep-inducing mediator in the brain.”
Sleep is essential for overall well-being and is especially important for heart health as it relates to blood pressure. Your blood pressure goes down while you’re asleep, so sleep troubles could make your blood pressure stay higher for a longer period of time, increasing the risk of heart disease and stroke.
The study authors also wrote that coffee’s anti-inflammatory benefit may be strongest if coffee is consumed in the morning, as some inflammatory markers in the blood peak in the morning.
The study shows that drinking coffee is beneficial for your health, and if you’re going to drink it, you should do so in the morning, Qi said.
Lüscher agreed with Qi’s recommendation. “We must accept the now substantial evidence that coffee drinking, particularly in the morning hours, is likely to be healthy,” he wrote in the editorial. “Thus, drink your coffee, but do so in the morning!”
If you’re still in need of an afternoon pick-me-up, try to drink the coffee at least nine hours before you go to bed—a 2023 study found that drinking coffee within 8.8 hours of going to bed could disrupt sleep.
