Having Your Coffee and Enjoying It Too
- JANE E. BRODY
6/25/2012

A disclaimer: I do not own stock in Starbucks nor, to my knowledge, in any other company that sells coffee or its accouterments. I last wrote about America's most popular beverage four years ago, and the latest and largest study to date supports that earlier assessment of coffee's health effects. Although the new research, which involved more than 400,000 people in a 14-year observational study, still cannot prove cause and effect, the findings are consistent with other recent large studies. The findings were widely reported, but here's the bottom line: When smoking and many other factors known to influence health and longevity were taken into account, coffee drinkers in the study were found to be living somewhat longer than abstainers. Further, the more coffee consumed each day - up to a point, at least - the greater the benefit to longevity. The observed benefit of coffee drinking was not enormous - a death rate among coffee drinkers that was 10 percent to 15 percent lower than among abstainers. But the findings are certainly reassuring, and given how many Americans drink coffee, the numbers of lives affected may be quite large. Updating the Evidence In decades past, experts repeatedly warned that a coffee habit could harm health and shorten lives. And, indeed, the new study did find that when the data were adjusted only for age, the risk of death was greater among coffee drinkers. But when the researchers took into account other health-related characteristics among the participants, like smoking, alcohol use, meat consumption, physical activity and body mass index, those who regularly drank coffee lived longer. "Coffee drinkers shouldn't be worried," said Neal Freedman, an epidemiologist at the National Cancer Institute who directed the study. "Their risk is quite similar to that of nondrinkers." Coffee drinkers who were relatively healthy when the study began were less likely than nondrinkers to die of heart disease, respiratory disease, stroke, diabetes, infections, injuries and accidents.