Study Says Drink Coffee, Live Longer

Coffee drinkers live longer. At least, this appears to be the collective conclusion of several recent studies. Indeed, yet another study has surfaced arguing that drinking a moderate amount of coffee every day is good for your health.

This most recent study says that those who frequently drink coffee have a lower risk of death in relation to several illnesses—including, of course, heart disease and diabetes—compared against people who do not drink coffee.

For this newest research, the team looked at data on more than 90,000 adults involved with a previous study; with data between 1998 and 2009. The adults from this study had neither cancer nor any history of cardiovascular issues; and all reported their levels of coffee consumption as well as other dietary information, providing access to health records throughout the duration of the study.

At the end of the observed decade, 8,700 of these study participants had died. After adjusting for several factors—including smoking—the researchers found that those who drank more coffee could be determined to be at a lower risk for death than those who did not drink coffee.

Furthermore, the study showed that the benefit appears to be related to coffee itself and not necessarily the caffeine; decaf drinkers also appeared to experience a lower risk of death. Also, the researchers found that the lower risk could be associated with as many as 5 cups of coffee per day (the equivalent of roughly 400 mg of caffeine).

Perhaps most importantly, though, the study showed that while drinking coffee appeared to be associated with a lower risk for death from chronic respiratory illness, pneumonia, influenza, suicide, diabetes, and cardiovascular diseases, it does not seem to reduce risk for cancer death.

Reporting to Reuters, lead author Dr. Erikka Loftfield—of the National Cancer Institute, in Rockville, MD—comments, “Although coffee drinking has also been inversely associated with incidence of certain cancers, like liver, in epidemiological studies, we did not observe an association between coffee and overall cancer mortality. This may be because coffee reduces mortality risk for some cancers but not others.”

Overall, though, researcher Frank Hu notes, “The main message is that regular consumption, meaning three to five cups of coffee a day, is associated with lower risk in total mortality from several causes like diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and suicide.”
The findings of this study have been published this week in the American Journal of Epidemiology.