Published: Nov 21, 2015 8:44 a.m. ET
Tall, grande or venti? Your answer may depend on whether you believe this.
People who drink three to five cups of coffee a day may be less likely to die prematurely from some illnesses than those who drink less coffee or don’t drink any coffee at all, according to a new study released by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health researchers and published online in the journal Circulation.
What’s more, drinkers of both caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee saw benefits, including a lower risk of death from cardiovascular disease, neurological diseases, Type 2 diabetes and suicide. “Moderate consumption of coffee may confer health benefits in terms of reducing premature death due to several diseases,” said senior author Frank Hu, professor of nutrition and epidemiology at Harvard. (These findings support a 2012 study of over 400,000 men and women published in The New England Journal of Medicine, which found an association between coffee drinkers and lower rates of mortality due to several diseases including stroke, respiratory diseases and diabetes.)
The data include nearly 168,000 women in the Nurses’ Health Study (I and II, the former started in 1976 and the latter started in 1989) and look at factors influencing women’s health, plus 40,557 men in the Health Professionals Follow-up Study, started in 1986and designed to complement the Nurses’ Health Study, sponsored by the Harvard School of Public Health and the National Cancer Institute. Coffee drinking was assessed using validated food questionnaires every four years over about 30 years. During the study period, 19,524 women and 12,432 men died from a range of causes.
