Coffee Drinkers Live Longer

Coffee has already been shown by numerous studies to do plenty of

wonderful things for your body.

For example, it’s well-known that coffee boosts concentration and reduces the risk

for heart disease, type 2 diabetes, liver disease, Parkinson’s disease, depression and Alzheimer’s disease.

New research takes this good news a step further, showing that coffee lowers the risk for death from 
a wide variety of major diseases. In fact, it’s the largest study to ever look at the link between coffee and health.

After hearing about that report, my main question was, how many cups do you really have to 
drink to potentially tack on years to your life? Is it a practical amount…or one of those absurd 
laboratory amounts that you often see in studies?

BREWING HEALTH BENEFITS

At the start of the study, researchers at the National Cancer Institute in Rockville, Maryland, 
gave questionnaires to more than 400,000 men and women ages 50 to 71 and asked them 
to report their coffee intake. They noted whether they drank mostly caffeinated or decaf coffee, 
what type (regular ground, instant, espresso, etc.) and whether they added products such as cream or sugar.

Results: Regardless of the drink’s caffeine content, the way the coffee was made or how much milk 
and/or sugar was used, the more coffee that people drank—up to about five cups a day—the lower 
their risk for death at the end of the 13-year study from health problems including heart disease, 
respiratory conditions, diabetes, stroke and infection. Check out this chart…

Coffee per day   Reduced risk of dying

8 ounces                    5% to 6%

16 to 24 ounces       10% to 13%

32 to 40 ounces       12% to 16%

48 ounces or more   10% to 15%

Alas—no association was seen between coffee and death from cancer.

Results differed a little bit between men and women, with the association

being slightly stronger for women than men.

MO’ JOE, ANYONE?

When we speak to lead researcher Neal D. Freedman, PhD, a cancer prevention fellow 
at the National Cancer Institute, he notes that coffee’s association with a

lower death risk doesn’t mean that a cause-and-effect relationship between the two was established.

And it’s impossible, at this point, to know exactly what properties of coffee may be helpful in 
preventing death. Coffee’s most famous constituent is caffeine, of course, but in reality coffee contains 
more than 1,000 compounds, including antioxidants and many others. Any of these could play a role.