Coffee lovers can rejoice as two new studies have validated it that greater consumption of coffee could lead to a longer life.
One study surveyed more than 520,000 people in 10 European countries, making it the largest study to date on coffee and mortality, and found that drinking more coffee could significantly lower a person’s risk of mortality.
The second study was more novel, as it focused on non-white populations. After surveying over 185,000 African-Americans, Native Americans, Hawaiians, Japanese-Americans, Latinos and whites, the researchers found that coffee increases longevity across various races.
Although coffee’s health effects have been revealed by scientists years back, but the topic has always been a controversial one as some researchers have also expressed their reservations to the health benefits of coffee due to its content of caffeine, which is seen as a stimulant.
According to a CNN report, people who drank two to four cups of coffee a day had an 18 per cent lower risk of death compared with people who did not drink coffee, according to the study.
These findings are consistent with previous studies that had looked at majority white populations, said Veronica Wendy Setiawan, associate professor of preventative medicine at USC’s Keck School of Medicine, who led the study on nonwhite populations.
“Given these very diverse populations, all these people have different lifestyles. They have very different dietary habits and different susceptibilities and we still find similar patterns,” Setiawan said.
The new study shows that there is a stronger biological possibility for the relationship between coffee and longevity and found that mortality was inversely related to coffee consumption for heart disease, cancer, respiratory disease, stroke, diabetes and kidney disease.
The study on European countries revealed an inverse association between coffee and liver disease, suicide in men, cancer in women, digestive diseases and circulatory diseases. Those who drank three or more cups a day had a lower risk for all-cause death than people who did not drink it at all.
Both studies were published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
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“We looked at multiple countries across Europe, where the way the population drink the beverage and prepare it is quite different,” said Marc Gunter, reader in cancer epidemiology and prevention at Imperial College’s School of Public Health in the UK, who co-authored the European study.
“The fact that we saw the same relationships in different countries is kind of the implication that it’s something about coffee rather than its something about the way that coffee is prepared or the way it’s drunk,” he said.
It is a complex mixture of compounds, some of which have been revealed in laboratories to have biological effects, Gunter said.
Studies have shown that certain compounds have neuroprotective and anti-inflammatory properties that can help reduce risk for illnesses like Parkinson’s disease.
In the European study, people who were drinking coffee tended to have lower levels of inflammation, healthier lipid profiles and better glucose control compared with those who weren’t. It is still unclear which particular compounds provide health benefits, but Gunter said he would be interested in exploring this further.
