If You Drink Coffee Every Morning, You Need to See This

You did everything right. You drink your coffee black. No sugar, no creamer, no syrup, no whipped anything on top. The way you've been told to drink it, as healthy for the last 15 plus years. Researchers gave people exactly that, strong black coffee, first thing in the morning. And it made their blood sugar response to breakfast 50% worse. So if it's not sugar doing it, what is? It's the clock, because there's a second study. 40,000 adults followed for about 10 years. And the people who drink their coffee in the morning, and then stopped, had a 31% lower risk of dying from heart disease. The people drinking the same amount, spread across the entire day, the signal wasn't there at all. And what most people don't get, is that the mistake a lot of people make with coffee, like drinking it in the afternoon, is what causes the problem tomorrow morning. It's a loop, and most people are stuck in it without having any idea. So I'm not here to take your coffee away. I love my coffee. Coffee might be the single most protective thing in your daily routine. I'm here to show you three dials that nobody has talked about before. And at the end of this video, I'm going to give you a simple five step protocol to implement what the research shows. When somebody says just drink your coffee black, doesn't give you enough data. Because it tells you what's in the cup, but says absolutely nothing about when the cup shows up. As you're about to see, the timing can do more damage than the sugar in the coffee. So let me give you the mechanism here. When you drink coffee, you're not just drinking one thing. You're drinking two things that go in completely different directions. Thing number one, obviously, is the caffeine. Now, this might surprise you, but caffeine doesn't give you energy. It has no energy in it. What caffeine does is block adenosine. It's the molecule that builds up in your brain that makes you feel tired and sleepy. Caffeine essentially sits in the parking spot so adenosine cannot get in. So you don't get energy, you get a temporary inability to perceive fatigue. The tiredness is still accumulating. Thing number two is the polyphenols, chlorogenic acids specifically. That's the reason why coffee shows up in a lot of research showing how it can help with things like type two diabetes, also fatty liver disease, and lowering the risk of cardiovascular disease. This is all good stuff. But whether you benefit from the coffee is decided by three dials. Dial number one is when does the first sip land? Most people drink coffee right after they wake up, before water, before food, before they could speak to their children. Now, here's what's happening in your body at that exact moment. You've got something called the cortisol awakening response. Cortisol climbs sharply in the first 30 to 45 minutes after you've waken up. This is completely normal. It's supposed to happen. That's your body slightly raising blood sugar to give you some energy to get you out of the bed and start your day. So if you're slamming your coffee at 6.30 in the morning, your blood sugar is already on its way up. That's where most people pour a stimulant like coffee into an empty stomach. Not the best idea. Researchers at the University of Bath ran this properly. It was a randomized crossover study looking at 29 adults, three separate overnight conditions. One night was normal sleep. One night they woke people up every hour for five minutes. I would have hated that. So they had fragmented sleep, like when you have a newborn or a bad week of sleep. And on the third night, the same fragmented sleep, but in the morning they gave these people a strong cup of black coffee, about 300 milligrams of caffeine, which is about a little over two cups of coffee. They gave it to them 30 minutes before a glucose drink. The first result, and this was a little bit of some good news, one bad night of sleep on its own did not wreck their blood sugar response. But the second result, when they added the coffee first thing in the morning, their blood sugar response jumped up by about 50%. This was black coffee, zero sugar, 50% worse glucose handling because of when it landed. So here's your fix, and it costs you nothing. Don't drink coffee first thing in the morning. Have water first. Remember this, hydrate before you caffeinate. Let the cortisol curve do its job. Then have your coffee after, ideally with food, a meal that has protein and fat, not carbohydrates. Because the protein and the fat slow down digestion, and it can help blunt that glucose excursion. You're not giving anything up, you're just delaying your cup of coffee, ideally up to an hour and a half after you wake up. Dial number two is what's riding in the cup. Because coffee is a vehicle, and whatever you put in it gets a free ride right into your body. Think about what happens when you eat sugar as a solid food. It takes time. It usually has fiber, maybe some fat or protein that slows things down. Your stomach empties gradually, so your body has these speed bumps in place. But liquid sugar skips every one of them. No chewing, no fiber, no gastric break. It arrives all at once. And the research on this is fascinating. A 2025 dose response meta-analysis pooled 18 prospective cohorts, over 540,000 people, looking at sugar and type 2 diabetes risk. It said that every additional 12-ounce serving of a sugar-sweetened beverage per day was associated with a 25% higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes. But I don't wanna just give you percentages, because sometimes percentages don't really change your behavior. Let me just show you. The American Heart Association says that men should cap their added sugar at around 36 grams a day. For women, they say 25 grams a day. That's it, for the whole day. Not just your coffee, the entire day. In one cup of coffee from Starbucks or Dunkin' Donuts, whatever latte you're getting that's sweetened, it could contain 25 to 40 grams of sugar in one cup of coffee. And the problem here is the accumulation of these hits over time. Sure, having a sweetened latte from time to time, no big deal. But having some sugar-sweetened beverage every day for months and years, that accumulation creates a lot of damage inside of your body. This is exactly what I saw with my dad, who had type 2 diabetes. And unfortunately, he suffered a massive stroke from his diabetes in 2014, and he ended up passing away. And it wasn't something that happened overnight. It was the accumulation of damage over time. Here's why this matters for you. If you've been struggling with stubborn belly fat, cravings, lower energy, achy joints, thinning skin, and losing muscle more easily than you're used to, well, most people are starting their morning with coffee and sugar, but almost nothing their aging body actually needs. So instead of taking your coffee away, simply just upgrade it. That's exactly why I put Equip Foods collagen protein powder in my coffee almost every morning. Collagen provides your body with the specific amino acids to support your joints, tendons, skin, and connective tissue, the stuff you should be thinking about if you're watching this over the age of 40, and you wanna keep your body moving and feeling young. And Equip Foods, their products are incredibly clean. It's grass-fed, grass-finished collagen peptides. No gums, no fillers, no pile of junk ingredients. And now you're replacing a sugar-loaded passenger with quality collagen protein, which is especially important for anybody after 40 who wants to preserve and build lean muscle mass, because getting enough protein helps you accomplish that. So instead of coffee, sugar, cravings, and then another cup of coffee, you're turning something you're already doing every morning into an opportunity to get collagen and protein without adding another habit to your daily routine. No extra routine, no extra meal. You're already drinking the coffee. That's why this is a no-brainer for me. And Equip is hooking up my community, you, with 20% off your order. If you click the first link in the description box right below this video or scan the QR code on the screen, you could get this special deal. When you go to that link, it'll take you to this page right here. They're collagen protein. I love their vanilla, but you could get whatever flavor you want. I'm going to add this to the cart. The coupon code is automatically applied. And if you wanna upgrade your coffee even more, I would consider getting their prime protein. If you go back to their page and go to the little three dots there and click on shop all products, you're gonna see their prime protein. I actually have a bag sitting right here on my desk. Sometimes I'll put that in my coffee as well. What you could do is click on the prime protein. You could see their different flavors. Chocolate is their most popular. I'm gonna add that to the cart. And your coupon code is applied to both, by the way. And this whole offer gives you a money back guarantee. So there's no risk in trying it in your coffee to see what it does for you. Same coffee, same ritual, but now you're giving your body something you could actually use. So scan the QR code or click the first link down below to get this special deal. This stack costs less than $2 per day. So try it out and let me know what you think. Now that we discussed fixing the passenger, the third dial might be even more important because your afternoon coffee might be sabotaging your tomorrow morning. Dial number three is the cutoff. I call this the caffeine curfew. Back to that European heart study from the top of this video because now I could show you what they actually found. 40,700 adults, they ran a clustering analysis on when people drink coffee. And two clean patterns fell out of the data on their own. There was the morning type, coffee concentrated between 4 a.m. and noon, then done. That was 36% of people. And then there was the all day type, coffee spread across morning, afternoon, and evening. That accounted for 16%. The median followup was 9.8 years. In the fully adjusted model, they adjusted for how much coffee, caffeinated versus decaf, tea, soda, sleep duration, trouble sleeping, diet quality, exercise, smoking, and even income. And get this, the morning type pattern was associated with a 16% lower risk of all-cause death compared to the non-coffee drinkers. What about the group that drank coffee all day long? No statistical significant association with either. They looked at whether drinking more coffee helped. In the morning type group, more coffee tracked with lower mortality risk right up past three cups a day. In the all day group, the dose response relationship just was not there. So the benefit of drinking coffee appeared to be on when they were drinking it. There are two mechanisms the authors put forward regarding this. Number one, caffeine late in the day suppresses melatonin and drags your circadian rhythm out of alignment. Number two, a lot of coffee's benefits is anti-inflammatory and several inflammatory markers naturally peak in the morning and bottom out around 5 p.m. So a morning loaded dose may be landing where there's something actually to work on. I hear from a lot of people, but Ben, coffee does not impact my sleep. You may not feel like it does, but the research shows that it does. In a controlled trial, 400 milligrams of caffeine, which is two to three cups of coffee, taken six hours before bed, cut objectively, measure total sleep time by more than an hour, six hours before bed. And the people in the study didn't notice. Their subjective report said they slept fine, but the monitor said otherwise. So if you consumed, let's say 200 milligrams of caffeine at 4 p.m. in the afternoon, at 12 a.m., you're gonna have about 100 milligrams of that caffeine still floating around in your bloodstream. That's not good. Which brings me to the protocol I promised you. Five easy moves. You lose nothing. Move number one, have water before your cup of coffee. High quality water like spring water or add some electrolytes to it, about 16 ounces. You wake up dehydrated, so hydrate before you caffeinate. Move number two, wait an hour and a half after you wake up to have that first sip of coffee or caffeine. Let the cortisol awakening response run its course before you add a stimulant on top of it. And I know, it sounds like a long time to wait, especially if you're so used to having coffee first thing in the morning. So maybe have the water first and wait 15 minutes. The next day, wait 30 minutes and build your way up to waiting 90 minutes. I can tell you from having thousands of students do this, most of them report positive results on the first time they try this. Move number three, if you're not getting quality sleep, if you have blood sugar issues, if you're highly stressed in life, probably not a good idea to have coffee on an empty stomach. Pair that cup of coffee with a protein and fat rich breakfast, like eggs and avocado. Or add the high quality collagen and protein powder to the cup of coffee. This can make a huge difference with your blood sugar response. Move number four is to swap the passenger. Don't remove it. I talked about the protein and the collagen. Add that in instead of syrup and sweeteners. You keep the ritual, you keep the sweetness, you just lose the liquid sugar. And move number five is having that hard cutoff, the caffeine curfew. I recommend no caffeine past 12 p.m. noon. That should be the cutoff. So have it all before 12 p.m. That's it, that's the whole protocol. I was never gonna tell you to give up the coffee. I was just going to give you an upgraded routine, and that is the upgraded routine. When you follow these tips, it's gonna help you feel like you're back in your prime, and that is my goal, to help you enter your second prime of life. I'm on a mission to help billions of people turn into prime humans, and I want you to be one of them. If this lesson was valuable, hit the thumbs up button, subscribe to the channel, and share this video with somebody you know who drinks coffee. This could be a game changer for their energy and for their health. I have a video I did here on YouTube where I did a crazy experiment. I consumed 30 tablespoons of olive oil within 10 days, and I tracked all these changes in my body. Day three, something really weird happened. Anyways, I outlined it all in this video. Here is a clip from that video. Then click the video on the screen coming up in a few seconds, and I'll see you in the next video. I'm gonna walk you through every day, the good, the bad, the part where I almost ruined the whole experiment by making one really stupid mistake. And after watching this or listening to this, trust me, you're gonna wanna try this. Okay, so here's the thing about olive oil that most people get wrong. When you say olive oil to the average person, they think, oh yeah.