Confirmed: Coffee makes us live longer

Do you start your day with a cup of coffee at home and then feel like another one as soon as you arrive at work? If you want to drink more coffee during the day, you often feel bad and try to resist the temptation. But now we have some excellent news for coffee lovers.

If you don't drink coffee at all, there is a good reason to start thinking about it. You could, for example, drink decaffeinated coffee.

The reason is that people who drink coffee live longer and are less at risk of death from heart disease, cancer, heart attacks, diabetes, respiratory and kidney diseases. This is true regardless of whether you drink coffee with or without caffeine.

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These are the findings of a joint study by the Medical Faculty of the University of Southern California and the Cancer Center at the University of Hawaii. The results of the research were published in Annals of Internal Medicine.

A cup or two a day keeps the doctor away

Researchers from the University of Southern California conducted a study entitled Coffee Drinking and Mortality in 10 European Countries, involving more than 520,000 people from 10 European countries. Their colleagues at the University of Hawaii focused on the coffee drinking habits of 185,000 adults of different ethnic backgrounds in the study, entitled Association of Coffee Consumption With Total and Cause-Specific Mortality Among Nonwhite Populations.

It turned out that one cup of coffee a day reduces the probability of death by 12%. In the case of three cups, it is even 18%. However, it can't be said that this is due to caffeine because lower mortality was also proved for decaffeinated coffee consumers.

It is very interesting that this was confirmed across different countries and ethnicities, and thus for people with different lifestyles and customs. It is concluded that coffee is beneficial to the health of whites, African Americans, Latin Americans and Asians. It should, therefore, be part of a healthy diet and lifestyle.

It seems that the World Health Organisation is starting to take mercy on coffee: after 25 years of labelling it as a carcinogen causing bladder cancer, the WHO announced last year that drinking coffee reduces the risk of kidney and uterine cancer.

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Article source Science Daily - online magazine focused on science and technology
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