With this new health news, you may be able to stop feeling guilty about grabbing another cup of coffee. In fact, that java may just be extending your lifespan. Relax, pour another cup and keep reading.
A 14-year study done at the National Cancer Institute and published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that coffee drinkers had a lower risk of death. Men coffee drinkers showed a 10 percent lower chance of dying, while women coffee drinkers reduced their risk of dying by 15 percent.
This study was the largest of its kind, with more than 402,000 people participating in it, making the results very solid, according to Neal Freedman, a nutritional epidemiology researcher who lead the research team.
Previous studies may have indicated that coffee drinking increases your risk of dying from heart disease, but when the researchers took into account people who smoke (many smokers also drink coffee), it was revealed that the smoking and not the coffee has a strong association with heart disease.
The study found that people who drank two or more cups of coffee a day reduced their risk, with the largest reduction occurring in people who drank six or more cups of coffee a day. Whether the coffee had caffeine or not didn’t seem to make a difference.
Of course, certain conditions and illnesses may not be compatible with coffee or caffeine, so if you plan on drinking coffee just to lower your mortality risk, you may want to check with your doctor first. While this is good news for coffee drinkers, it shouldn’t be seen as a reason to suddenly start drinking 12 cups of coffee a day.
Also, there is no clear reason why drinking coffee seems to lower your risk of dying. It could be anything from compounds and antioxidants present in coffee to the social aspects of sharing a coffee with a friend.
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