Coffee & Your Liver

You probably know already that alcohol isn’t the best drink for liver.

Even if you don’t drink enough for liver poisoning, there are still such issues as: Occasional Drinking? 3x Risk Of Liver Scarring

It turns out that your poor liver cannot even catch a break with soft drinks: Soft Drinks & Your Liver: Sugar vs Sugar-Free Sweeteners

Nor are drinks the only culprit! We’ve written, for example, about: The Household Cleaner That Triples Liver Disease Risk ← here we are talking about using the household cleaner to clean things. We can confidently assert that drinking it would be even worse.

And even things that are taken to help our body, can harm our liver: Before You Reach For That Tylenol… ← respectable painkiller for some things, very high hepatotoxicity though

It seems everything is out to get our liver!

So where does coffee filter into this?

Finally, a drink that’s not brewing trouble for the liver

Researchers (Dr. Shelly Lu et al.) investigated this by following 354,957 participants (without cirrhosis or liver cancer at baseline) for an average of 13 years, examining coffee intake alongside liver disease outcomes, MRI scans, and blood protein profiles.

In few words, compared with non-coffee drinkers, people consuming 5 or more cups daily enjoyed:

• 47% lower risk of liver cancer (hepatocellular carcinoma)
• 42% lower risk of dying from liver disease
• 32% lower risk of cirrhosis

There was a dose-response relationship: liver disease risk generally decreased as coffee intake increased, and although benefits were evident even with just 1–2 cups daily, the strongest associations were seen at 3–4 cups daily.

Per test type:

• Scans: higher coffee intake was associated with lower liver fat, less excess liver iron, reduced fibrosis (scarring), and less liver inflammation, when checked via MRI.
• Bloods: coffee drinkers had higher levels of proteins linked to healthy liver function and lower levels of proteins associated with inflammation, fibrosis, and macrophage activation, which is also cool because it shows likely biological explanations for the observed associations.

You may be wondering whether caffeine content matters: and the answer is no! Caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee showed comparable associations with better liver health, indicating compounds other than caffeine (in likelihood coffee’s impressive array of antioxidants of various kinds) contribute to the benefits.

You can find the paper itself, here: Coffee Consumption and Improved Liver Outcomes: Clinical, Imaging, and Proteomic Evidence From the UK Biobank

Not a fan of coffee?

If you’re not a fan of coffee, but also not a fan of aging, high blood pressure, frailty, cancer, Alzheimer’s, suicide, diabetes, atrial fibrillation, and more, fear not; there is a supplement option available:

Green Coffee Bean Extract: Coffee Benefits Without The Coffee?

Want to learn more?

We’ve written a lot about coffee before, so rather than drop a million links here, here’s one link to an article from a couple of weeks ago, that provides a lot of excellent jumping-off points into the many benefits of coffee: Which Coffee Is Best vs Aging?

If you’d like to give your liver a helping hand in other ways, consider:

N-Acetyl Cysteine For The Liver & More

And as for MASLD as it is nowadays called (metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease*, used to be called NAFLD, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease), see: How To Unfatty A Fatty Liver

^{*Attentive readers may have noticed that there appears to be a D missing from the acronym. We noticed that too, and were not able to find any explanation of why it’s not MDASLD. However, you can read about why the change itself was made, and how the decision was agreed upon, here: A multisociety Delphi consensus statement on new fatty liver disease nomenclature}

Or for a purely dietary approach, enjoy: Top Diets & Fasting vs Fatty Liver: What’s Best?

Take care!