A new study from Harvard published in the journal Circulation on Monday suggests that drinking coffee regularly may help boost potential health benefits, including a longer life.
"In our study, we found people who drank three to five cups of coffee per day had about a 15 percent lower [risk of premature] mortality compared to people who didn't drink coffee," said nutrition researcher Walter Willett of the Harvard School of Public Health (via NPR), one of the authors of the study.
The researchers studied over 200,000 women and 50,000 men in a span of 28 years. The researchers looked into the amount of coffee the adults consume, including other food and drinks, and then compared it with their rates of death and disease over two decades.
"The lower risk of mortality is consistent with our hypothesis that coffee consumption could be good for you [because] we have published papers showing that coffee consumption is associated with lower risk of type 2 diabetes and [heart] disease," said Ming Ding, a doctoral student in Harvard School of Public Health department of nutrition (via Fox 8 Cleveland).
They found out that those who drank three to five cups of caffeinated or decaf coffee, and are not smoking, were 15 percent less likely to die of any cause compared to non-coffee drinkers.
The factor that could make coffee drinkers have a longer life, according to study author Frank Hu, is an antioxidant called chlorogenic acid, which is abundant in coffee.
Aside from a longer life, the study found out that the chlorogenic acid also may bring into effect 19 percent reduction in heart disease deaths and 24 percent reduction in diabetes deaths. Dr. Frank Hu said that these are because both heart disease and diabetes are spurred by inflammation, and is reduced by the chlorogenic acid in coffee.
The study further revealed that, among non-smokers, drinking 3 to 5 cups of regular or decaf coffee daily were 37 percent less likely to die from neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson's and 36 percent less likely to die from suicide.
