Drink Coffee; Live Long!
Posted by Jacob Goldstein
June 17, 2008, 8:57 am
Drinking a few cups of coffee every day won’t kill you. It might even help you live a bit longer.
Researchers from the Harvard and the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid crunched data from two big studies that followed more than 100,000 people over roughly 20 years. After adjusting for variables such as smoking and age, the authors found that the risk of death from all causes declined as coffee consumption increased. It was true for regular as well as decaf.
The study, funded by the NIH and published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, is online here.
annals.org
“Our results suggest that long-term, regular coffee consumption has several beneficial health effects,” Esther Lopez-Garcia, the lead author told USA Today. In particular, drinking lots of coffee appeared to lower the risk of cardiovascular death, but didn’t affect the risk of dying of cancer.
While the Health Blog is delighted to learn that our morning wakeup fared well in this study, we must also dutifully report that there is reason to be skeptical about the results.
How much coffee people drank was based on patients’ self reporting, which tends to be unreliable. What’s more, it’s entirely possible that people who drink lots of coffee may share other characteristics that are the real reason for the lower risk of death.
While you ponder that, we’ll have a second cup.
blogs.wsj.com |
