Office Coffee Machine May Be Raising Your Cholesterol Levels: Report

The office coffee machine is a daily hub of activity for many corporate employees, providing a much-needed caffeine boost to tackle the workday. However, a surprising side effect of this daily ritual has come to light: the potential to increase cholesterol levels. Research reveals that coffee from workplace machines, like boiled coffee, contains elevated levels of cholesterol-boosting compounds – but a simple solution may lie in switching to paper filter coffee makers.

The study is led from Uppsala University, and conducted in collaboration with Chalmers University of Technology. The study is published in the journal Nutrition, Metabolism & Cardiovascular Diseases. 

"Considering how much coffee is consumed in Swedish workplaces, we wanted to get a picture of the content of cholesterol-elevating substances in coffee from these types of machines. We studied fourteen coffee machines and could see that the levels of these substances are much higher in coffee from these machines than from regular drip-filter coffee makers. From this we infer that the filtering process is crucial for the presence of these cholesterol-elevating substances in coffee. Obviously, not all coffee machines manage to filter them out. But the problem varies between different types of coffee machines, and the concentrations also showed large variations over time," says David Iggman, researcher at Uppsala University, who led the study.

The fact that boiled coffee in a pot contains high levels of the worst of the cholesterol-elevating substances, the diterpenes cafestol and kahweol, is already known. It's even mentioned in the latest Nordic nutritional recommendations, where the advice is to reduce or refrain from drinking boiled coffee. However, a regular drip-filter coffee maker, which uses a paper filter, manages to almost completely filter out these cholesterol-elevating substances. 

How well conventional coffee machines, which are found in public environments such as workplaces, filter out these substances had not been investigated up until now. In the study, the researchers studied fourteen coffee machines in break rooms at different workplaces. The coffee used was five regular brands of ground coffee. They took samples from the coffee made by the machines on a number of separate occasions and analysed the contents. There was a big difference between the machines in terms of the levels of cafestol and kahweol in the coffee they made, but the levels could also differ at different times. 

"Most of the coffee samples contained levels that could feasibly affect the levels of LDL cholesterol of people who drank the coffee, as well as their future risk of cardiovascular disease. For people who drink a lot of coffee every day, it's clear that drip-filter coffee, or other well-filtered coffee, is preferable. To determine the precise effects on LDL cholesterol levels, we would need to conduct a controlled study of subjects who would drink the coffee," says David Iggman.