Even without caffeine: Anyone who drinks coffee dies later

Coffee extends life – even when you drink a lot. Decaffeinated coffee is also valid. In any case, a team led by Erikka Loftfield of the National Institutes of Health will come to this happy end. The research group badyzed four genes for caffeine metabolism and the drinking and lifestyle habits of half a million seniors primarily from the British Biobank – a British cohort study. As the team writes in "JAMA Internal Medicine," about ten percent fewer coffee drinkers died than expected over the ten years of study, regardless of the specific genetic makeup or metabolism. number of cups. In fact, mortality at four cups or more a day even seems to be slightly lower – even with decaffeinated coffee.

A number of previous studies have already shown that reducing coffee consumption reduces mortality. In order to test whether this property had anything to do with caffeine metabolism, the researcher examined whether different variants of four genes involved increase or decrease the effect. There was no indication of this – the differences were small, and the effect extending life was also demonstrated in decaffeinated coffee. Caffeine is therefore not responsible for the positive effect. However, why coffee should have these positive presumptive effects is also still completely obscure – in fact it is still possible that the coffee itself is not responsible for the effect, but another mechanism that makes the more or less randomly linked drink statistically.