Does coffee raise cholesterol?
Unfiltered coffee can. In 14 trials, more coffee went with higher total and LDL cholesterol, and the rise was biggest with boiled coffee. Trials of paper-filtered coffee showed very little change. If your LDL is high, brew through a paper filter.
What we’d do
Keep your coffee, and put it through paper. Drip and pour-over with a paper filter are fine. If you drink several cups a day of French press, Turkish or boiled coffee and your LDL is high, that’s the one coffee habit we’d change.
Why it depends on the brew
The oil in coffee beans carries a compound called cafestol that raises cholesterol. A paper filter catches most of it, and unfiltered coffee lets it all into the cup. The filter works like the lint trap in a dryer.
Researchers measured the cafestol in coffee bought at shops in Singapore, Indonesia and India in 2011, and the way it was brewed changed the amount about fiftyfold.
| How it was made | Cafestol per cup |
|---|---|
| Paper drip, or Singapore’s cloth “sock” | about 0.09 mg |
| Indian metal mesh filter | about 0.05 mg |
| Indonesian sock or metal filter, about the same as espresso | about 0.85 to 0.98 mg |
| Unfiltered, about the same as boiled, Turkish or French press | about 4.4 mg |
The unfiltered cup had around 50 times the cafestol of the paper-filtered one. By the researchers’ estimate, 5 cups a day of the unfiltered kind would raise total cholesterol by about 13 mg/dL (0.33 mmol/L) and triglycerides by about 18.
What the trials found
A 2001 review pooled 14 trials of coffee. More cups went with higher total and LDL cholesterol. The rise was biggest in trials of boiled coffee and in people who already had high cholesterol, and the trials of filtered coffee showed very little increase.
A surprise from Singapore
In the same 2011 study, 3,000 adults in Singapore were asked how much coffee they drank. Even people drinking 3 or more cups a day had about the same LDL as people drinking less than a cup a week. Singapore’s traditional cloth sock filter turned out to catch cafestol about as well as paper.
Espresso sits in the middle. A cup carries about ten times the cafestol of paper-filtered coffee, and about a fifth of an unfiltered cup’s.
The cafestol is in the coffee oil, which is why the filter decides it. If your LDL is high and you’re working on it, a box of paper filters is a cheap fix.
2 sources
- Jee SH, He J, Appel LJ, Whelton PK, Suh I and Klag MJ, Coffee consumption and serum lipids: a meta-analysis of randomized controlled clinical trials, American Journal of Epidemiology, 2001pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Naidoo N and others, Cholesterol-raising diterpenes in types of coffee commonly consumed in Singapore, Indonesia and India and associations with blood lipids, Nutrition Journal, 2011pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
