Coffee May Boost Chances For A Longer Life, Study Shows
Even drinking less than one cup of coffee per day lowers the risk of premature death due by 6 percent, the study found.
Researchers say this suggests caffeine wasn't responsible, but as the study was observational more research is required to determine what is behind the benefit.
In one study of nearly half a million people spread out across 10 European nations, researchers found that drinking three cups of coffee a day may help you live longer.
The researchers said: "The study provides further evidence that drinking coffee can be part of a healthy diet and offers reassurance to coffee drinkers".
Her team followed the 498,134 participants, aged 38 to 73, from 2006 until 2016, during which time 14,225 of them died. They too showed a beneficial effect when they drank coffee regularly. There is, it seems, nothing called too much coffee. nearly.
"There are compounds in caffeine and coffee beans - polyphenols, antioxidants, magnesium - [and] this reduces inflammation, it lowers insulin resistance", ABC News Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Jennifer Ashton said Tuesday on "Good Morning America".
It used participants' own reports of how many cups of coffee they drank per day.
The results do not prove that your coffee pot is a fountain of youth, nor are they a reason for abstainers to start drinking coffee, said Alice Lichtenstein, a nutrition expert at Tufts University in the United States who was not involved in the research.
So there you have it: a habit that so many of us enjoy that is suggested, once again, to actually be good for us. New research shows it may boost chances for a longer life, even for those who down at least eight cups a day.
In other words while coffee drinking has some benefits especially in dealing with non-communicable diseases, your genes decide how well you metabolise caffeine.
The second main way in which the study builds upon past research is that it took into account mortality incidence with respect to genetic differences in participants' metabolizing of caffeine. One cup of coffee lowers the risk of death by eight percent.
The study covered almost half a million people. "This new study is consistent with the previous studies but show [s] that the potential benefit extends to higher intakes of coffee,"he said."But [it] doesn't mean that everyone should drink 8 cups of coffee a day".
No doubt more coffee studies will be along in the very near future.
Other studies have found coffee drinkers have a lower risk of heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, several cancers, including colorectal, breast, uterine and liver, and Parkinson's disease. But it turns out that even slow caffeine metabolizers seem to share the death-risk-reduction connected to coffee drinking.