Drinking Coffee Can Help You Live Longer-Study

There has been a lot of misconceptions about coffee. Few say that drinking coffee is bad for your health, while others opine that, it is good. So this has led to a lot of confusion among the general public.

However, one needs to see to it that too of much of everything is bad for your health. So this holds true even in case of coffee. If you drink too much, it can hamper your health, but when you drink coffee in moderation it can actually do good to your health.

A new study has found that drinking three to four cups of coffee a day may lower the risk of death and developing heart disease as compared to non-drinkers.

For the study, researchers had reviewed about 200 studies. According to the researchers drinking coffee is also associated with lower risk of some cancers, diabetes, liver disease and dementia.

The review was recently published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ).

"Drinking three to four cups of coffee a day is associated with a lower risk of death and getting heart disease compared with drinking no coffee," researchers said. However, they said that drinking coffee in pregnancy may be associated with harms, and may be linked to a very small increased risk of fracture in women.

They said that excluding pregnancy and women at risk of fracture, "coffee drinking appears safe within usual patterns of consumption," suggesting that coffee could be safely tested in randomised trials.

To better understand the effects of coffee consumption on health, a team led by Robin Poole, from the University of Southampton in the UK, carried out an umbrella review of 201 studies that had aggregated data from observational research and 17 studies that had aggregated data from clinical trials across all countries and all settings.

Drinking coffee was consistently associated with a lower risk of death from all causes and from heart disease, with the largest reduction in relative risk of death at three cups a day, compared with non-coffee drinkers, researchers said.

Increasing consumption to above three cups a day was not associated with harm, but the beneficial effect was less pronounced, they said.

Coffee was also associated with a lower risk of several cancers, including prostate, endometrial, skin and liver cancer, as well as type 2 diabetes, gallstones and gout.

The greatest benefit was seen for liver conditions, such as cirrhosis of the liver. There seem to be beneficial associations between coffee consumption and Parkinson's disease, depression and Alzheimer's disease, researchers said.