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Coffee, Even a Lot, Linked to Longer Life
Scientists wake up and smell the apparent health benefits
Coffee is powerful stuff. Researchers discovered earlier this year that just a whiff is enough to increase the body’s arousal levels, helping jonesers wake up and feel focused. Yet purported links to cancer, poor heart health, and shorter lives have percolated for decades. Now, better-brewed studies are debunking the previous bad news and linking coffee — even several cups a day — to specific health benefits and longer life.
One new study revealed that, contrary to prior research, drinking coffee isn’t thought to stiffen the arteries, which can force the heart to work harder and lead to a heart attack or stroke.
Researchers pored through a database of 8,412 people who had MRI heart scans and other cardiovascular tests and who answered questions about their coffee consumption. They found there was no difference in the stiffening of arteries among the people who said they had less than a cup a day versus those who drank one to three, or even four to five cups. Several people in the study reported drinking more than 25 cups per day — which generated a flurry of media coverage — but those people were excluded from the study.
“Whilst we can’t prove a causal link in this study, our research indicates coffee isn’t as bad for the arteries as previous studies would suggest,” says study team member Kenneth Fung of Queen Mary University of London. However, he cautions: “The coffee consumption in this study is self-reported, and so a limitation in this study is that the real intake could be over- or under-reported.” The research was presented on June 3 at a meeting of the British Cardiovascular Society.
Looking at the latest research, coffee seems to be somewhere between relatively benign and beneficial for most healthy adults.
A separate study published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine last year, which relied on the same dataset used by Fung’s team, “suggests a lower risk of death was associated with drinking more coffee, including among coffee drinkers who have eight or more cups per day.”
