There is new evidence about the health benefits of coffee. Coffee drinkers are a little bit likelier to live longer than those people who do not drink coffee at all. The study claims it does not even matter whether one drinks decaf or regular coffee. According to the Washington Post, this was the largest study ever done on this issue because it involved almost half a million people.
According to Neal Freedman, who was the lead researcher on this particular study and works out of the National Cancer Institute, it really looks like drinking coffee does not do a person harm. On the contrary, he actually states that there are advantages in drinking coffee. The problem is, though, despite all of this research in this largest study of its kind ever conducted, no one is still really sure why coffee appears to do more good than harm.
Coffee has a lot of different ingredients that can affect the health of an individual, whether those are small amounts of substances associated with cancer or good things such as antioxidants. It must be noted that the most notorious ingredient in coffee, caffeine, actually did not play a role in the results of this large study.
There is also something curious about the lifestyle habits of the coffee drinkers in this study. For one, the coffee drinkers in this study were a lot more likely to consume more alcohol, smoke more, exercise less and consume greater amounts of red meat than people who did not drink coffee. However, believe it or not, once the researchers of this study took the aforementioned, unhealthy lifestyle habits into consideration, it became clearer that drinking one cup of coffee per day actually increased the chances of those people of living longer.
Conclusion
It is warranted that people think about drinking coffee in a whole, new light. According to the Harvard Health Letter, the benefits of coffee include anti-cancer properties that lowered rates for colon, liver, breast and rectal cancers compared to non-coffee drinkers. Also, “Heavy coffee drinkers may be half as likely to get diabetes as light drinkers or non-drinkers.” It may also help protect men against Parkinson’s Disease.