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A nutritional therapist claims drinking morning coffee can do more harm than good. Olivia Hedlund posted the now-viral TikTok post warning against drinking coffee on an empty stomach.
The video, posted in mid-September and now has 582,500 views, is part of her series on how viewers can improve their lives. “Not only is coffee acidic, so it’s heavy on the stomach in the morning, but it puts our bodies into a stress response, releasing the stress hormone cortisol and putting us in a kind of fight-or-flight state,” she claims.
General practitioner and medical journalist Dr. Christoph Specht agrees with this statement – at least in part. Coffee indeed affects the sympathetic nervous system (also called the sympathetic nervous system), which regulates the ability to act under stress. The sympathetic nervous system, for example, increases heart rate and programs the body to respond more quickly to an attack or high pressure, should the worst happen. “That’s actually why we drink coffee in the first place,” Specht said. However, exactly how strong the effect depends on many individual factors and cannot be generalized.
“I used to drink several cups of coffee on an empty stomach, and then I had a bunch of hormonal acne and wondered why,” Hedlund recalls. “It’s because your body is stressed. Eating something small before you have a cup of coffee is best. I promise you will notice a difference.”
According to a medical expert, “What you can say is that there does seem to be a link between caffeine and hormones – especially estrogen.” Nevertheless, he says, the connection is much more complicated than TikTokerin portrays. In this context, he refers to a study with 260 female subjects published in the “American Journal of Clinical Nutrition” in 2012, which showed that caffeine could affect the estrogen balance of women. Still, the influence was “not clinically relevant,” Specht explains in an interview with RTL. “Clinically means that it has any effect on important functions,” the physician explains. In other words, a tiny difference is measurable but has no demonstrable consequences for the body.
- source: heute.at/picture:
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