Coffee — caffeinated or decaffeinated — appears to extend the lives of people who drink it daily, the largest study ever done on the issue has found. Coffee, caffeinated or decaffeinated, appears to extend the lives of people who drink it daily, the largest study ever done on the issue has found. Men who drank two to three cups a day had a 10 percent chance of outliving those who drank no coffee, while women had a 13 percent advantage, according to research by the National Institutes of Health and AARP published Thursday in the New England Journal of Medicine. The study by researchers at the National Cancer Institute involved 400,000 people to compare coffee drinkers with those who avoid it to determine whether the beverage can delay the risk of dying from ailments such as heart disease, diabetes or respiratory illness, said Neal Freedman, the lead study author. It is unclear why coffee may be beneficial, and more research is needed to study that question, he said. After years of waffling research on coffee and health, and some fear that java might raise the risk of heart disease, the results should reassure coffee lovers. Our study suggests that's really not the case, said lead researcher Neal Freedman of the National Cancer Institute. There may actually be a modest benefit of coffee drinking. Coffee contains a thousand things that can affect health, from helpful antioxidants to tiny amounts of substances linked to cancer. The most widely studied ingredient — caffeine — didn't play a role in the new study's results. There is evidence that coffee can raise LDL, or bad cholesterol, and blood pressure at least short-term, and those, in turn, can raise the risk of heart disease. Even in the new study, it first seemed that coffee drinkers were more likely to die at any given time. But they also tended to smoke, drink more alcohol, eat more red meat and exercise less than non-coffee-drinkers. Once researchers took those things into account, a clear pattern emerged: Each cup of coffee per day nudged up the chances of living longer. The study doesn't prove that coffee makes people live longer, only that the two seem related. Like most studies on diet and health, this one was based strictly on observing people's habits and resulting health. So it can't prove cause and effect. But with so many people, more than a decade of follow-up and enough deaths to compare, this is probably the best evidence we have and are likely to get, said Dr. Frank Hu of the Harvard School of Public Health. He had no role in this study but helped lead a previous one that also found coffee beneficial. The new one began in 1995 and involved AARP members ages 50 to 71 in California, Florida, Louisiana, New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Atlanta and Detroit. People who already had heart disease, a stroke or cancer weren't included. Neither were people at diet extremes — too many or too few calories per day. The rest gave information on coffee drinking once, at the start of the study. People are fairly consistent in their coffee drinking over their lifetime, so the single measure shouldn't be a big limitation, Freedman said. Of the 402,260 participants, about 42,000 drank no coffee. About 15,000 drank six cups or more a day. Most people had two or three. By 2008, about 52,000 of them had died. Compared with those who drank no coffee, men who had two or three cups a day were 10 percent less likely to die at any age. For women, it was 13 percent. Even a single cup a day seemed to lower risk a little: six percent in men and five percent in women. The strongest effect was in women who had four or five cups a day — a 16 percent lower risk of death. None of these are big numbers, though, and Freedman can't say how much extra life coffee might buy. I really can't calculate that, especially because smoking is a key factor that affects longevity at every age, he said. Coffee drinkers were less likely to die from heart or respiratory disease, stroke, diabetes, injuries, accidents or infections. No effect was seen on cancer death risk, though. Other research ties coffee drinking to lower levels of markers for inflammation and insulin resistance. Researchers also considered that people in poor health might refrain from drinking coffee and whether their abstention could bias the results. But the study excluded people with cancer and heart disease — the most common health problems — to minimize this chance. Also, the strongest benefits of coffee drinking were seen in people who were healthiest. About two-thirds of study participants drank regular coffee, and the rest, decaf. The type of coffee made no difference in the results. Source: seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2018225008_coffee17.html