Coffee Drinkers Rejoice: Major Study Says You May Live Longer

Could a cup of coffee keep the doctor away? It looks so. And not only that, it appears coffee can delay the appearance of the Grim Reaper.

Yes, a major new Harvard study says, coffee may help you live longer.

The study released Tuesday is yet another to show a positive relationship between coffee drinking and long-term health.

People who drink at least a cup of coffee a day — both regular and decaf — have a lower chance of dying prematurely from cardiovascular disease, neurological diseases, type 2 diabetes and suicide, the study said.

And the people who had three to five cups per day had the lowest risk of all.

“This study provides further evidence that moderate consumption of coffee may confer health benefits in terms of reducing premature death due to several diseases,” Frank Hu, a Harvard professor and author on the paper, said in a school press release.

“These data support the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Report that concluded that, ‘Moderate coffee consumption can be incorporated into a healthy dietary pattern.’”

The study, published in the American Heart Association journal “Circulation,” further confirms what previous research has shown: drinking coffee is probably good for you.

Coffee has also been shown to reduce risk of diabetes, Alzheimer’s and depression in women.

The researchers in the Harvard study used survey data from three other studies that covered more than 200,000 people over 30 years. In those studies, participants were asked about their food consumption habits about once every four years along with a wide range of other health factors.

Over the course of those studies, nearly 32,000 of the participants died.

Initially, the Harvard researchers found a small correlation between coffee drinking and delaying or preventing disease or “hazard death rates” such as cardiovascular disease, neurological diseases, type 2 diabetes and suicide. The researchers also took into consideration other factors, like smoking, body mass index, physical activity, alcohol consumption and eating habits.

The coffee drinkers who had up to three cups a day had between a 5 and 9 percent lower hazard death rate, and those who drank between three and five cups had a 7 percent lower rate. Any more than five cups didn’t seem to matter much.

Once the researchers threw out the smokers, the results were much stronger.

• The up-to-three-cups drinkers had 6 to 8 percent lower hazard death rates.
• Those who drank between three and five cups had 15 percent lower rates.
• And people who drank five cups a day had 12 percent lower rates.

“We were able to provide solid evidence to the association between coffee drinking and risk of mortality,” Ming Ding, a Harvard doctoral student and the paper’s lead author, told Patch via email.

“Furthermore, the large sample size allowed us to conduct analysis among never smokers to strip out the confounding of smoking. However, our study is an observational study, and we do not know if the inverse association is causal.”

• Read the full Harvard study on coffee and health here.