Your daily cup of coffee is not only giving you a jumpstart for the day but is also probably increasing your chances of living longer, a new study based on a large survey says.
Neal D. Freedman and colleagues, researchers of the study, analyzed the association between coffee drinking and death in more than 400,000 people in the National Institutes of Health-AARP Diet and Health Study.
At the beginning of the study in 1995-96 the participants were 50 to 71 years old and did not have any heart disease, stroke or cancer. The participants were asked to fill a survey questionnaire describing their lifestyle and coffee drinking habits. All the participants were followed till the year 2008.
Almost 50,000 people had died during the study period. Except for deaths due to cancer, researchers found that people who drank more than 3 cups of coffee a day had 10 percent lower chances of dying than people who stayed away from coffee.
“Whether this was a causal or associational finding cannot be determined from our data,” write Freedman and colleagues.
There are many conflicting reports on the effects of coffee. A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine says that coffee consumption can’t be linked to risk of heart attacks or stroke while another study says that coffee is positively related to increased risk of heart attack.
"It's a big study with a remarkable result. It's a little bit hard to believe that coffee drinking is protective against all those different causes of death,” said Dr. Arthur Klatsky, senior consultant in cardiology for Kaiser Permanente of Northern California who was not a part of the present study, to WebMed.
Recent reports have suggested that coffee consumption does not have results in adverse outcomes of pregnancy. Generally pregnant women are asked to keep coffee or more specifically caffeine consumption to moderate levels.
Coffee is not the only drink that contains caffeine. The recommended 300 mg limit for pregnant and breast-feeding mothers is about four 8-ounce cup of tea or five 12-ounce cup of soda. One cup of chocolate chips contains about 104mg of caffeine.
“For those who do drink coffee, there's no reason to stop. Periodically someone will say it's bad, but I think this strengthens the view that it's not harmful," said Lawrence Krakoff, a cardiologist from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, to Reuters. Krakoff wasn’t part of the present study.