Coffee drinkers, go ahead and pour yourself another cup of java! According to a new study – in fact, the largest analysis of the link between coffee consumption and mortality – there’s no need to worry about the amount of coffee you drink. The study published in the latest issue of the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that coffee drinkers actually had a lower risk of death during the 14-year study.
“I would say it offers some reassurance to coffee drinkers,” said Neal Freedman, a nutritional epidemiology researcher at the National Cancer Institute. “Other studies have suggested a higher risk of mortality with coffee drinking and we didn’t see that in our study.”
The study found that men who drank at least six cups of coffee a day had a 10 percent lower chance of dying during the study period than non-coffee drinkers. For women, the risk was 15 percent lower.
Freedman and his team in NIC’s Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics reviewed the coffee habits of more than 402,000 healthy people (229,000 men and 173,000 women) between the ages of 50 and 71, including more than 52,000 who died.
And don’t worry if you don’t drink 6 cups of coffee a day; people who drank between two and five cups of coffee daily also appeared to have lower risk, Freedman says. He also admits that his study is an observational study, and cannot say whether or not coffee in itself is the cause of decreased risk of death. There could be something in the act of making, serving, or drinking coffee that protects people from death, or perhaps it’s the high level of antioxidants in coffee. This study doesn’t have the answer.
In the meantime, enjoy that cup (or two or three) of coffee!