Drink Coffee – Live Longer?

Coffee may be many people’s beverage of choice, but its healthy properties are unclear, as over the years it has been linked to a variety of health effects, both good and bad. But now, scientists in Madrid, Spain and Boston, US have found that people who drink up to six cups of coffee a day are no more likely to die earlier – and, as an added bonus, are less likely to die from heart disease.

Of more than 80,000 women who were studied from 1980 to 2004, those who drank two or three cups of caffeinated coffee every day were 25% less likely to die from heart disease than those who didn’t drink coffee. The study, published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, found that they were also 18% likely to die from any cause other than heart disease or cancer. The benefits were not so clear in the 40,000 men studied – the death rate was neither significantly higher nor significantly lower in the coffee drinkers.

Participants in the studies, funded by the US National Institutes of Health, filled in questionnaires every two to four years, in which they were asked about their coffee consumption and other dietary habits, whether or not they smoked, and whether they had any health problems. The scientists compared the frequency of death from any cause, death from heart disease and death from cancer among the groups of people with different coffee drinking profiles. All those questioned were free of cancer and heart disease at the start of the studies.

Even after other risk factors such as body size, diet, smoking and disease were taken into account, the coffee drinkers were less likely to die, and much of this was attributed to the lower risk of death from heart disease. Importantly, they also found that there was no link between death from cancer and coffee consumption. None of the findings appeared to be linked to caffeine, as decaff drinkers also had lower death rates than coffee avoiders.

Although the study must be treated with caution – not least because the quantities of coffee consumed were estimated by the study participants themselves, and there might be some other trait peculiar to the coffee drinking group other than the coffee itself that is having the effect – it does certainly appear that coffee may well have a positive effect on the cardiovascular system, and this is unrelated to its caffeine content. It is the caffeine that has previously been linked to most of the health benefits coffee is believed to have – for example, a reduction in Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, diabetes and gout. But it is also linked to its alleged negative effects, too, including coronary heart disease. This study appears to refute that.

Esther Lopez Garcia, who led the study, claims that while coffee consumption has previously been linked to various beneficial and detrimental health effects, data on its relationship with death were lacking. ‘The possibility of a modest benefit of coffee consumption on heart disease, cancer and other causes of death needs to be further investigated,’ she says.

26 June 2008, International Food Ingredients