Turns Out Most Adults Can Have Up To 5 Cups Of Coffee A Day, But It’s Not As Simple As That

I live in Italy, so coffee is not exactly an occasional treat in my life. It is part of the daily routine and it’s everywhere. It’s woven into work breaks, post-lunch rituals, quick conversations, and those moments when someone says “pausa caffè”, even though everyone knows they mean a tiny espresso.

And Italian coffee culture has its own peculiar logic. You can order a coffee and get something that looks almost comically small compared with the giant cups served elsewhere. However, that tiny espresso somehow carries the weight of a full-blown social ritual. 

Today, I’m embracing the noble winds of journalistic truth and doing what any mildly concerned coffee drinker would do: combing through research, studies, and an unreasonable amount of information online to figure out what we actually know about coffee and caffeine.

Turns out that you can have not one, two, three, but five coffee cups a day (with caveats), that coffee is more than just caffeine, and that your body may have a very different opinion about your fifth cup than mine does. To top it off, I’ve brought in the voices of Steph Ley, a BANT-registered nutritionist; Joy Dubost, PhD., a registered dietitian and nutrition consultant; and Dr. Ryan Peterson, an anesthesiologist specializing in substance abuse and addiction medicine. Without further ado, let’s get into it.