Hello and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our

podcast episodes to help you improve your health. Today we're discussing the

health benefits and potential harms of the world's most popular drink.

Coffee. We drink 2 billion cups of the stuff every day, but how much coffee is bad for your health? Coffee expert

James Hoffman and leading scientists Professor Tim Specter are here to help us

understand.

There's a sort of broad guideline of about 300 milligrams per day as you

sort of recommended daily limit though I have to say my own experience it is so incredibly personal and that people's response to caffeine particularly is is a broad spectrum.

So just because you're below 300 doesn't mean it's the right quantity for you. I sort of want to add that in there.

And actually one of the interesting things about coffee just quickly or caffeine that people don't talk about enough. It's one of the few good

legal performance enhancing compounds that are sort of left, though it was temporarily banned

by the Olympic Committee for a while, so you couldn't have too much coffee before running a race because

it does increase your power output. So caffeine before the gym is a good thing and I think from my own experience

definitely see the benefits of that. It's only about 1% advantage so if you're an elite athlete

1% is a lot that for the average weekend gym go.

Well I was just thinking that I always really like a cup of tea just before I go to the gym and this has always made everybody laugh and now I finally I mean let's be

honest it's because I like a cup of tea a lot but I'm now going to say it's just about pushing that

extra 1% is brilliant I've got my I've got I think everyone's got their excuse now for

bringing in their super fratigino into the gym though the I think the tested

quantity was about a 200 milligram dose so it's quite a lot of caffeine really so just to sort of

caveat my way out of that one just quickly. That's fine and on sleep so I mean I

was at a personal level I definitely find that caffeinated drinks affect sleep and we know that sleep is really important for health

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