7 Healthy Things to Add to Your Coffee, Ranked

An alternative to preflavored coffee, spices like cinnamon and chicory root can infuse a distinctive taste and appealing aroma to your cup while providing a bonus health benefit, notes Jackie Newgent, RDN, a plant-forward chef, culinary nutrition expert, and 2025 Forbes Health advisory board member.

“You can add ground spices to your coffee before or after brewing,” says Newgent. When adding spices afterward, let your freshly brewed coffee steep for five minutes to allow the spice flavors to become well-infused. Alternatively, you might find it works best to whisk spices into milk or plant-based milk before adding them to brewed coffee.

No doubt you’ve seen people using their social media to promote proffee, a concoction of protein powder and coffee. Videos tout the combination as a protein-packed pick-me-up with weight loss benefits. While Pedre maintains that adding the powder to any drink is a great way to get more protein in the diet, there is one problem: Your body can only digest so much protein at a time. And unless your body digests protein properly, it can absorb only a fraction of the protein, regardless of the form that’s ingested.

Therefore, to reap the maximum amount of protein, you would want to spread out your proffee intake throughout the course of a day.

Dave Asprey popularized adding grass-fed butter to coffee when he launched Bulletproof Coffee in 2011. “It may not be for everyone, but grass-fed butter — not regular butter — in coffee can actually have some real health benefits,” says Pedre.

Lemon water and lemon-infused tea have been go-to wellness cocktails for decades, and more recently there’s been a trend across social media touting the benefits of adding the citrus juice to coffee. The premise suggests combining the caffeinated stimulant with the fruit works as a weight loss aid.

People began adding this kitchen staple, aka sodium bicarbonate, to coffee in hopes of neutralizing its acidic effects, since baking soda is alkaline. In theory, cutting highly acidic (usually cheap) coffee with baking soda will neutralize the naturally occurring acids in the coffee and make it easier on the stomach. In practice, however, it’s probably not such a great idea.