Good news, coffee drinkers: A couple of massive new studies that looked at hundreds of thousands of people for about 16 years finds that a few cups of coffee a day won’t hurt you and could lower your risk of dying prematurely.
The studies reinforce previous findings that drinking an 8-ounce cup of joe (or three) won’t hurt you, but the authors of the new works and other experts say caveats abound.
“Our results suggest that moderate coffee drinking, up to about three cups a day, is not harmful to your health, and that incorporating coffee into your diet could have health benefits,” said Neil Murphy, of the World Health Organization, a lead author on one of two studies published Monday in the Annals of Internal Medicine. “[We] found no evidence that coffee drinking above a certain level is detrimental to health.”
Murphy told STAT his is the largest study on coffee and mortality to date.
In the study, researchers with the WHO’s International Agency for Research on Cancer and Imperial College London tracked 521,000 adults from 10 European countries who self-reported their coffee consumption over an average of 16 years. They looked for associations between the amount of coffee consumed and various health indications, but it’s not a cause-and-effect relationship. In investigating more than 40,000 deaths from this group, the team found that participants who fell into the highest 25 percent of coffee consumers had a lower risk of death due to any cause compared to non-coffee drinkers. They saw a reduced risk of early death by diseases related to the digestive and circulatory systems. The researchers also discovered a link between higher coffee consumption and lower risk of early death by lung cancer in men.
And they also looked at suicide — completed suicides were lower for coffee drinkers, but only in men.
In a second study of 180,000 people tracked for an average of 16 years, University of Southern California investigators found drinking one to six cups of coffee per week led to a decreased risk of early death. The study was focused on non-white populations, and their findings proved consistent for coffee drinkers across racial and ethnic groups.
Both studies adjusted findings to take into account that people who drink larger amounts of coffee are likely to smoke tobacco products as well.
One of the USC study’s senior authors, V. Wendy Setiawan, an assistant professor at Keck School of Medicine, said coffee consumption may be linked a lower risk of early death for people with heart disease, cancer, chronic lower respiratory disease, stroke, and kidney disease. Drink one cup per day, and the risk of dying early from those diseases decreases by 12 percent, she said.
However, Setiawan said the study didn’t find the same relationship between coffee and deaths related to influenza, pneumonia, Alzheimer’s disease, or intentional self-harm.
Dr. Eliseo Guallar, an epidemiologist with Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who was not involved in the study, wrote in an editorial accompanying the studies that he’s hesitant to draw too many positive conclusions about coffee’s health. “Recommending coffee intake to reduce mortality or prevent chronic disease would be premature,” he wrote.
Setiawan, like Murphy and Guallar, is cautious about hype.
“We cannot say coffee will prolong your life,” Setiawan said. “We can say moderate coffee consumption can be incorporated into diet for a healthy lifestyle. For most, it seems, it likely won’t cause harm.”
My mother loved her daily,1 or 2 cups (not mugs) for all of her adult life.When she would meet someone who told her they didn’t drink coffee, she was incredulous, as if they told her they didn’t breathe.She died age 97, her mind still sharp as a tack- I love it too,and grind and brew it every morning,hoping for the best !
Working as a chef full time from age 18 to 30, I found myself drinking 5-8 cups (coffeecof.com) a day, all double shots.. It compensated for my lack of sleep and kept me at a manic pace all day. When I did this on a day off it would make me sketchy and emotional.. These days I have 1-2 a day and I find it a perfect component of my daily routine
My mother drank one or two cups of coffee a day for most,if not all of her adult life.When she met someone for lunch and she/he would say they didn’t drink coffee,she was amazed that they didn’t drink it!
She died at 97 years,her mind sharp as a tack,obviously because of many decades drinking her very favorite hot beverage !
Or, does it mean that people who happen to have genes that lower mortality rates for those diseases are attracted to coffee drinking? Not saying I disagree – I’d like it to be true – but studies can mean a lot of different things.
correct — correlation alone never proves causation. Which is why the strongest conclusion the investigators make in the article is that drinking coffee won’t cause harm.
once upon a time — like 40 years ago — there were studies suggesting harm. This is just one of dozens since (though distinguished by it’s duration) proving those studies were wrong.
I have been reading about positive heal;th effect from drinking coffee longer than the 16 years of this study.
Are you trying to raise the price of coffee Starbucks has done a goof job of that