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Do not hesitate to serve yourself a cup of coffee before reading this – even if you have already eaten it today.
Yet another study has shown that drinking coffee is associated with longer life and a lower risk of premature death. This adds to an important body of research indicating that coffee has positive effects on the heart, liver, brain and more.
The latest study, published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, reveals that people who drink more coffee have a lower risk of death even though they drink eight or more drinks a day, and even if their genetics make them slow to treat caffeine.
The study involved 500,000 people in the UK, including 387,494 coffee drinkers. The results suggest that people who drank two to five cups of coffee a day were about 12% less likely to die than non-coffee drinkers during the 10-year period of the study. People who drank six to seven cups were 16% less likely to die, and people who drank eight or more were about 14% less likely to die.
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It does not matter whether coffee is decaffeinated or regular, ground or instant – everything was beneficial (although the link with a lower risk of death was lower for instant coffee).
Up to eight cups a day – or more
This recent study draws on data from the British Biobank study, a comprehensive research initiative that collects data and tracks 500,000 people for three decades. The group studied had 54% of women and was on average 57 years old. Ten years after the start of the study, 14,225 people had died. Among the at least generally healthy people in the UK and listed in this study, coffee drinkers seem to benefit from this habit. The results of the study showed that coffee drinkers overall had a lower risk of death, just as many other studies have found.
Because the genetics of some people make them slower to metabolize caffeine, the researchers wanted to see if it made drinking coffee more risky for these people. But it turns out that even the slow metabolizers of caffeine seem to share the reduced risk of death associated with coffee consumption.
As with all studies such as this one in which researchers observe a group of people over time, this study can not prove that coffee is the cause of the reduced risk of death. We can just say that people who drink coffee are less likely to die early.
But it was not only a very large study that showed significant results, it is one of the many studies that indicate that coffee can be beneficial for health.
Koichi Kamoshida / Getty
Evidence of health benefits of coffee continues to accumulate
Another large study of 500,000 people in Europe showed results similar to those of Recent UK research: men drinking three cups of coffee per day The risk of death was 12% lower over a 16-year period than abstainers, and women who drank as much coffee were 7% less likely to die.
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Another study of 185,855 multiethnic Americans confirmed this result. People who drank one cup a day were 12% less likely to die. Consumption of two to three cups a day was associated with an 18% decrease in the risk of premature death. This study is particularly important because it shows that these benefits apply to African-Americans, Native Hawaiians, Japanese Americans, Latinos, and whites. (People of color are not always as well represented in these types of studies.)
Other research indicates that coffee drinkers are less likely to develop various forms of cancer: diabetes-type 2, depression, Alzheimer's, dementia, cirrhosis of the liver, and heart disease.
In many studies, it does not matter whether the coffee is caffeinated or not, indicating that many benefits are not related to caffeine – there are in the coffee all kinds of other antioxidant compounds that might have an effect. Yet at least one recent study assigns the lowest risk for cardiovascular disease and stroke to caffeine, although these researchers have again warned that exaggerating with caffeine was possible.
As all this data shows, coffee is probably beneficial for most of us, and at least not harmful. So the next time someone says they're trying to limit their coffee consumption, you can tell them not to worry about it.
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