RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA—Your daily caffeine fix perks you up in the morning, and thanks to coffee's antioxidants, there's some evidence that cup can protect against heart disease. Unless you're a fan of nondairy creamer. A study of Swiss adults, published in the latest edition of the Journal of Nutrition, has found that nondairy creamer can prevent your body from absorbing some of the healthy antioxidants in coffee, while adding milk or drinking it black didn't have any effect.
THE DETAILS: In this small-scale study, researchers at the Nestlé Research Center had nine healthy adults, who normally consumed between one and five cups of coffee per day, drink either instant black coffee, instant coffee with whole milk added, or instant coffee with a three-in-one product that contained sugar, a vegetable-oil–based nondairy creamer, and premixed coffee. Once a week for four weeks, the participants were asked to abstain from drinking coffee, tea, or any caffeinated beverages before coming into the lab for the study, where they were given one of the three coffee options. Then, their blood was collected at various points over a 12-hour period and analyzed for levels of phenolic acids, the healthy antioxidants found in coffee. The researchers found that absorption levels of two phenolic acids were nearly 30 percent lower when people drank the nondairy-creamer coffee than when they drank ordinary black coffee or coffee with whole milk. They also found that it took longer for the remaining antioxidants in the nondairy-creamer coffee to be absorbed—in some cases 222 percent longer—compared to black coffee or coffee with milk.
Read on for more about the downside of nondairy creamers.
WHAT IT MEANS: Stick with the real stuff if you like to take your coffee with milk. Whether a nondairy creamer with ingredients different from the product in this study would have the same affect on antioxidants is difficult to tell without additional research, notes Mathieu Renouf, PhD, research scientist at Nestlé Research Center. But aside from affecting coffee's healthy components, many nondairy creamers do contain vegetable oils like corn and palm oils that may be hydrogenated, a process that introduces heart-damaging trans fats into a product, along with other ingredients like casein (a protein derived from milk that makes nondairy creamers intolerable for people with milk allergies) and various artificial flavors and preservatives. Altogether, it's a convincing argument for sticking with real milk, half-and-half, or soy milk if you don't like drinking your coffee black.
And if you're not a coffee drinker, eat more plants. You can still get the same heart-healthy antioxidants found in coffee from other sources, says Renouf. "Phenolic acids from coffee are actually derived from chlorogenic acids during the digestion process," he says, and those same chlorogenic acids come from salads, artichokes, and potatoes. He adds that whole grains are another rich source of phenolic acids.