Drink Coffee, Live Longer

Two studies released the same day report what coffee drinkers love to hear: If you drink coffee, you may live longer.

The studies, both published July 10 in Annals of Internal Medicine, indicate your morning coffee can be a healthy habit. In one study, researchers at the Keck School of Medicine in Los Angeles followed more than 185,000 people from a variety of ethnicities for 16 years and concluded even one cup a day helps. Of those tracked, people who drank one cup a day were 12% less likely to die over the course of the study. Two or more cups reduced the risk of dying to 18%.

Those studied included African-Americans, Japanese-Americans, native Hawaiians, and Caucasians.

The second study tracked 520,000 Caucasian men and women from 10 European countries. Researchers concluded that men who drank three or more cups, or the equivalent, each day were 18% less likely to die than non-drinkers during the 16-year period. Women’s risks were reduced by 8%.

The study also concluded that the European test subjects were less likely to die from liver or circulatory diseases. The results showed other health benefits as well.

Researchers concluded antioxidants and anti-inflammatory compounds in both regular and decaffeinated coffee were responsible for the positive results. Work continues to identify which compounds deserve the credit.

“A major strength of our study is that it included participants with widely varying dietary, lifestyle, and coffee drinking habits,” says lead co-author Neil Murphy, Ph.D., a scientist in the section of nutrition and metabolism at the International Agency for Research on Cancer (part of the World Health Organization).