The health benefits of drinking coffee are well-researched and far-reaching. Once considered an unhealthy beverage, in the past 60 years coffee has done an about face and is now generally considered to be one of the healthiest beverages on the planet. But it turns out, drinking coffee may only be beneficial to your health and not others. A new study finds that coffee drinkers may donate weaker blood.
As reported by New Atlas, the study is the work of scientists from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus and was recently published in the journal Haematologica. For the study, the examined red blood counts (RBC) from over 13,000 donors from the REDS RBC-Omics study. 643 individuals were asked to come back and give blood again, based on their extremes for “hemolytic propensity,” which is to say, they expressed very high or very low levels of destroyed RBCs.
Then, eight participants underwent more rigorous tests, having their blood tested before and after consuming coffee in order to see the short-term effects of caffeine on RBCs. In both tests, “higher caffeine levels were associated with disrupted RBC metabolism.”
They found that higher caffeine levels were associated with lower adenosine triphosphate (ATP) and 2,3-bisphosphoglycerate (2,3-BPG) rates. Since RBCs have no means of producing their own energy, they require these “fuel molecules” in order to function. So with lesser ATP and 2,3-BPG to access, RBCs aren’t able to perform as well.
Caffeine was also shown to make RBCs more fragile, showing more signs of oxidative damage. In transfusions, the blood from donors who drank a lot of caffeine resulted in “smaller hemoglobin increases.”
Currently there are no recommendations in America regarding caffeine consumption before donating blood. And if anything, the recommendation would be to drink coffee beforehand, due to its ability to “increase donor blood pressure and vascular tone, facilitating venous access and blood withdrawal efficiency.” These findings suggest that America switch to those of many European countries, who advise to limit caffeine consumption before donation. Since caffeine has a short half-life, refraining from coffee even a short time before donating blood could have a significant impact on the quality and efficacy of the sample.
So if you’re planning on giving blood, maybe lay off the coffee until after you’ve gotten the poke. Because the whole point of giving blood is to help someone in desperate need, and delaying your coffee for a little bit to make sure your donation is as good as possible seems like a small price to pay.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.