Researchers did not look at tea, soda or other beverages but plan to in future analyses. Drink filtered coffee rather than boiled - filtering removes compounds that raise LDL, the bad cholesterol. Extra calories and fat could negate any benefits from coffee. The type of coffee made no difference in the results. Also, the strongest benefits of coffee drinking were seen in people who were healthiest when the study began.Ībout two-thirds of study participants drank regular coffee, and the rest, decaf. But the study excluded people with cancer and heart disease - the most common health problems - to minimize this chance. Researchers also considered that people in poor health might refrain from drinking coffee and whether their abstention could bias the results. Other research ties coffee drinking to lower levels of markers for inflammation and insulin resistance. No effect was seen on cancer death risk, though. "I really can't calculate that," especially because smoking is a key factor that affects longevity at every age, he said.Ĭoffee drinkers were less likely to die from heart or respiratory disease, stroke, diabetes, injuries, accidents or infections. None of these are big numbers, though, and Freedman can't say how much extra life coffee might buy. The strongest effect was in women who had four or five cups a day - a 16 percent lower risk of death. For women, it was 13 percent.Įven a single cup a day seemed to lower risk a little: 6 percent in men and 5 percent in women. Compared to those who drank no coffee, men who had two or three cups a day were 10 percent less likely to die at any age. Most people had two or three.īy 2008, about 52,000 of them had died. About 15,000 drank six cups or more a day. Of the 402,260 participants, about 42,000 drank no coffee. He had no role in this study but helped lead a previous one that also found coffee beneficial. Frank Hu of the Harvard School of Public Health. So it can't prove cause and effect.īut with so many people, more than a decade of follow-up and enough deaths to compare, "this is probably the best evidence we have" and are likely to get, said Dr. Like most studies on diet and health, this one was based strictly on observing people's habits and resulting health. The results are published in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine.Ĭareful, though - this doesn't prove that coffee makes people live longer, only that the two seem related. The study was done by the National Institutes of Health and AARP. Once researchers took those things into account, a clear pattern emerged: Each cup of coffee per day nudged up the chances of living longer. But they also tended to smoke, drink more alcohol, eat more red meat and exercise less than non-coffee-drinkers. There is evidence that coffee can raise LDL, or bad cholesterol, and blood pressure at least short-term, and those in turn can raise the risk of heart disease.Įven in the new study, it first seemed that coffee drinkers were more likely to die at any given time. It's not that earlier studies were wrong. The most widely studied ingredient - caffeine - didn't play a role in the new study's results. Coffee contains a thousand things that can affect health, from helpful antioxidants to tiny amounts of substances linked to cancer.
"There may actually be a modest benefit of coffee drinking." "Our study suggests that's really not the case," said lead researcher Neal Freedman of the National Cancer Institute.
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