For years, athletes and regular people have used coffee to boost performance and enhance fatigue resistance. But will coffee boost your metabolism? The answer is positive, and this effect occurs through several mechanisms. There's a logic behind the inclusion of caffeine in many popular fat-loss supplements. Caffeine raises the rate at which you lose weight. Want to know how coffee boosts metabolism?
Without releasing and burning off stored fat, coffee's effect on raising calorie expenditure won't reduce weight. There are two ways in which coffee acts.
1. Caffeine Stimulates Your Nervous System: By acting on the sympathetic nervous system to release adrenaline, coffee acts on nerve cells to increase the firing rate. This also speeds up nerve transmission, leading to stronger muscle action.
2. Caffeine Produces More Epinephrine - By stimulating adrenal glands to generate more epinephrine, a flight or fight hormone needed for stress response, coffee signals fat cells and makes them release fatty acids. These are burned for the body's energy needs.
The number of calories your body burns at rest increases with coffee intake. It also depends on your lean muscle mass and other factors. Coffee can raise your metabolic rate even if you do absolutely no extra physical activity.
A 1995 report in The Annals of Nutrition & Metabolism by Koto and his co-authors looked at the effects of coffee consumption on a subject's metabolic rate.
When people drank coffee enhanced with 200 mg of caffeine, their metabolic rate went up by 3–11%. Most of this boost came from the oxidation of fat in the blood.
One more paper in the American Journal of Physiology studied the differences in metabolism between men of different ages. They found that all men experienced similar thermogenic outputs after drinking coffee. Younger men released more free fatty acids which led to higher metabolisms.
Increasing physical performance can happen indirectly when you boost your metabolism. With weight training, your body becomes more efficient at burning fat for fuel. This helps you shed excess fat and makes you perform more efficiently.
This is the reason athletes supplement their workouts with caffeine (or drink black coffee). Coffee favorably influences your rate of metabolism. It lets you burn more calories, even when you are resting with no physical activity.
Coffee also increases thermogenesis releasing more heat and burning fats to generate it. Black coffee is best since it will not blunt the fat-liberating effects of insulin.
There really is quite a lot that's worthy of appreciation about how home coffee makers and office coffee machines have transformed the coffee-drinking habits of people around the world.