The results of a new decade-long study suggest that drinking coffee could lead to a longer life expectancy.
The research, published on 2 July in the JAMA Internal Medicine journal, suggests that moderate amounts of coffee a day can improve longevity.
Researchers studied a cohort of half a million British adults over a decade: 498,134 women and men aged between 38 to 73 who voluntarily registered with the UK Biobank genetics database.
In 2006, participants were asked to fill out questionnaires about daily coffee consumption, exercise and other habits, and received physical exams including blood tests. Most were coffee drinkers. About 154,000 drank two to three cups daily, and 10,000 drank at least eight cups daily.
Ten years later at the end of 2016, the participants were followed up to evaluate associations of coffee drinking with mortality by genetic caffeine metabolism score.
Searchers looked at the number of deaths over the 10 year period, which included 14,225 participants, who mostly died of cancer or heart disease.
Researchers found, according to the BBC, a small but statistically significant trend showing that the more coffee who people drank coffee, the more likely they were to live longer. In other words, a higher percentage of the non-coffee drinkers died.
Overall, coffee drinkers were about 10 to 15 per cent less likely to die than coffee abstainers abstainers. The cohort of half a million British adults found “inverse associations” for coffee drinking with mortality, including among participants drinking up to eight cups of coffee per day.
“These findings suggest the importance of non-caffeine constituents in the coffee-mortality association and provide further reassurance that coffee drinking can be a part of a healthy diet,” the study said.