Drinking more coffee leads to a longer life, two studies say

Why do you drink coffee?

Many of us drink coffee because of pleasure or because we are hooked up with our friends, and some drink because of its health benefits.

There are a lot of coffee studies linking towards its benefits to what it does to our body. Some studies show a negative side effect of drinking coffee because of its caffeine, while other studies show that drinking coffee gives us a lot of health benefits.

So, what is the truth?

A recent study that came out shows that drinking coffee could lead to a longer life.

Well, this news is amazing! Don’t you think? But this study doesn’t mean that you can drink your coffee twenty cups a day.

According to the study, people who drank two to four cups a day had an 18 per cent lower risk of death compared with people who did not drink coffee. These findings were supported by the previous studies about health benefits of coffee.

We are all aware that drinking coffee is good for the heart, can lower cholesterol levels and can prevent other diseases. The new study shows that there is a stronger biological possibility for the relationship between coffee and longer life because people who drank coffee have a lower risk of heart disease, cancer, respiratory disease, stroke, diabetes and kidney disease.

Both studies were published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Coffee is a complex mixture of compounds, some of which have been revealed in laboratories to have biological effects.

Studies have shown that certain compounds have neuroprotective and anti-inflammatory properties that can help reduce the risk for illnesses like Parkinson’s disease.

The study has also shown the effects of drinking coffee to smokers from nonsmokers since we know that smoking reduces lifespan and cause a lot of diseases. However, they found that coffee had inverse effects on mortality for smokers too.

“Smoking doesn’t seem to blunt the effects of coffee,” Gunter said. “It didn’t matter whether you smoked or not. There was still a potential beneficial effect of coffee on mortality.”

The studies have efficiently shown that drinking coffee can give us a longer life, and it has been documented that coffee drinkers have a lower risk of death.

With all observations from previous studies, however, it’s difficult to exclude the possibility that coffee drinkers are just healthier, to begin with, Gunter said.

“We looked at multiple countries across Europe, where the way the population drinks coffee and prepares coffee is quite different,” said Marc Gunter, reader in cancer epidemiology and prevention at Imperial College’s School of Public Health in the UK, who co-authored the European study.

“The fact that we saw the same relationships in different countries is kind of the implication that it’s something about coffee rather than its something about the way that coffee is prepared or the way it’s drunk,” he said.

People who avoid coffee, particularly in places like the US and Europe, where drinking the beverage is very common, may do so because they have health problems. Their higher mortality rate could be a result of them being less healthy, to begin with.

“I think that the solid conclusion is that if you’re a coffee drinker, keep drinking your coffee and be happy,” Ascherio said. And if you’re not? “I think you can go on drinking your tea or water without a problem.”

Meanwhile, Gunter and Setiawan stand a bit more firmly on coffee as a health benefit.

“The takeaway message would be that drinking a couple cups of coffee a day doesn’t do you any harm, and actually, it might be doing you some good,” he said.

“Moderate coffee consumption can be incorporated into a healthy diet and lifestyle,” Setiawan said. “This studies and the previous studies suggest that for a majority of people, there’s no long term harm from drinking coffee.”

Source: CNN