July 12, 2012

According to a new study in the New England Journal of Medicine Drinking a daily cup of coffee -- or even several cups -- isn't likely to harm your health, and it may even lower your risk of dying from chronic diseases such as diabetes and heart disease. The new study is by far the largest of its kind to date. As part of a joint project with the AARP, researchers from the National Institutes of Health followed more than 400,000 healthy men and women between the ages of 50 and 71 for up to 13 years, during which 13% of the participants died. Overall, coffee drinkers were less likely than their peers to die during the study, and the more coffee they drank, the lower their mortality risk tended to be. Compared with people who drank no coffee at all, men and women who drank six or more cups per day were 10% and 15% less likely, respectively, to die during the study. This pattern held when the researchers broke out the data by specific causes of death, including heart disease, lung disease, pneumonia, stroke, diabetes, infections, and even injuries and accidents. Cancer was the only major cause of death not associated with coffee consumption. Even moderate coffee consumption was linked to better survival odds. Drinking a single cup per day -- which was much more common than a six-cup-a-day habit -- was associated with a 6% lower risk of dying among men and a 5% lower risk among women. In the study, both regular and decaf were associated with a lower risk of dying, which suggests that these and other substances in coffee might be more important than caffeine. But even decaf contains trace amounts of caffeine, so the authors can't entirely rule out the possibility that caffeine has an effect on health. Who then would counsel people that coffee is evil?