Does Coffee Make You Fat?
Q: Does coffee make you fat? I was listening to a popular podcast and heard a health professional say it does. Sure, the “health professional” was a psychiatrist but I’m not discerning enough to know that his claim is a classic example of the expert opinion fallacy because his credentials only qualify him to be trusted in matters of the mind and not in the field of nutrition. So yeah, any truth to what he said?
A: At only 2 calories per 8 oz cup, black coffee offers very little in terms of calories. It’s only when milk, cream, sugar, syrup, and other ingredients are added that the calories start racking up. Given that, it’s easy to conclude that drinking coffee with popular additives can make you gain weight. However, the truth of the matter is that regardless of how you drink your coffee, coffee cannot make you gain weight. What does make you gain weight is taking in more calories than you expend.
Consuming more calories than your body burns on a regular basis is what’s responsible for weight gain. With this in mind, you can go to McDonald’s and order a large McCafé caramel frappé with 650 calories every day for the rest of your life and not gain weight if everything you eat and drink for the day doesn’t exceed your total daily calorie requirements. Conversely, you can gain weight if you drink a cup of black coffee every day of your life and exceed your total daily calorie requirements when everything you eat and drink is tallied for the day. This is all to say that coffee by itself cannot make you gain weight, neither can any other food or beverage.1This applies the other way around, too. So although caffeine is commonly touted as a fat burner, coffee by itself cannot help you lose weight because what accomplishes that is the creation and maintenance of a calorie deficit. Only when you’re taking in fewer calories than your body needs can coffee help with fat loss, which is by contribution rather than facilitation.
Lifestyle, behavior, genetics, health, and the environment are among the many pathways for fat gain. Another is nutrition and on that front, coffee can’t make you fat. But being the omniscient genius I am, I know that’s not the context surrounding the claim made by Daniel Amen, the man who I’m also omniscient enough to know is the health professional from the podcast you watched where the argument was made for coffee making you fat by a pathway that has less to do with food and more to do with physiology in general and cortisol in particular.2 Yes, yes, marvel at the fact that I KNOW E-V-E-R-Y-T-H-I-N-G!!!
Cortisol is a stress hormone that has several beneficial effects but among its bad ones are its impairment of insulin function and promotion of fat storage in the abdomen when there are high levels of it in the body. Well, it turns out that caffeine increases cortisol. On account of that, the argument is that coffee primes the body for fat gain, especially when it’s consumed in the morning because cortisol is naturally produced by your body to help you wake up from a night’s rest and drinking coffee further elevates levels of the hormone.
Research does indeed support the claim that elevated cortisol hinders weight management but that’s only when there’s prolonged exposure to high levels of the hormone. That’s not the case with caffeine, as it produces a short-lived rise in cortisol that doesn’t appear to have an effect on fat accumulation. Speaking to that, several studies have found that regular coffee drinkers typically have less body fat, particularly in the abdominal area, than those who don’t consume caffeine as frequently. That defies the realm of possibility if the cortisol from caffeine is as bad as it’s made out to be.
Physiologically, there isn’t any risk of coffee making you fat.3In fact, coffee might help you slim down because there’s more than enough evidence from numerous controlled studies to suggest that the relative leanness of coffee drinkers compared to their non-drinking counterparts is a direct effect of caffeine’s modest ability to boost the metabolism. Instead, the greater threat to fat accumulation is when cortisol is chronically elevated over an extended period of time. As such, the concern for avoiding fat gain by way of cortisol should be on lowering stress through things such as exercising more and getting better sleep, as those activities have much more pronounced effects on reducing cortisol than eliminating a cup or two of coffee every day.
Now, does anyone else have a fitness or nutrition question of their own that they want to ask?
Glossary: caloric deficit, calories, fat, fitness, food, genetics, hormones, metabolism, nutrition
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