The Woohoo! Report

Grab that cuppa joe without feeling guilty…can this be true? A recent study has shown that drinking even large amounts of coffee may actually prolong your life!

One of the largest of its kind ever done, the study conducted by the University of Madrid has reported that drinking up to six cups of coffee daily does not lead to premature death. Esther Lopez-Garcia tracked 86,214 female nurses for 24 years and 41,736 male veterinarians, pharmacists, and other health workers for 18 years. The volunteers answered detailed questionnaires every two years about coffee consumption, exercise habits, weight, smoking history, and other health information.

Despite the fact that coffee drinkers tend toward less healthy lifestyle habits such as smoking and less to no exercise (factors that are linked to higher death rates), overall, participants who consumed a few cups of coffee a day had about the same death rate as those who didn’t drink coffee.

Researchers also found that women drinking two to three cups a day had a 25% lower death rate from heart disease and an 18% lower risk of death from all causes compared with their equally unhealthy peers. Men didn’t have the same results, but it was suggested that it’s probably because fewer men were tested. As for those of you wondering about the caffeine in coffee, both decaf and caffeinated coffee drinkers had similar death rates, which seems to say that caffeine is not responsible for the benefits of drinking coffee.

What’s more, the death rates of those who drank more than two to three cups of coffee daily were not significantly different from those of coffee drinkers who drank only two to three cups.

These discoveries suggest that coffee may reduce the risks of death, but also of heart disease, cancer, and other illnesses. There is some suggestion that the antioxidants in coffee may be the cause of these benefits.

“There’s very little evidence that coffee itself is a bad thing. It’s gotten a bit of a bum rap,” says Ken Mukamal, an internist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston who has been involved in other epidemiological studies on coffee and mortality. “There’s a little bit of a legacy of thinking there’s something sort of hedonistic about drinking coffee, and I don’t think it’s all that warranted.”

But will any coffee, no matter what kind or how it’s made, do? Not according to the study.

“Boiled drinks like Turkish coffee and French press have high levels of a cholesterol-boosting compound called cafestol. And “coffee drinks” like mocha triple venti lattes are full of calories, which may offset any benefit of the coffee itself, [Mukamal] says. By contrast, filtered drip coffee, which most of the survey respondents consumed, has few calories and almost no cafestol.

The study is probably “saying something about filtered, good old-fashioned 1980s and 1990s coffee and not saying very much about the fancy kinds of coffee that you might be drinking in 2008,” Mukamal says.

[source]