Smoke or know someone who does? (Hey we won’t judge)
Studies continue to find that coffee consumption has many positive effects on health ranging from lower rates of cardiovascular disease to lower cancer, to better lipid profiles, to the surprising finding that smokers too get an improved mortality rate if they consume coffee.
How about that, smokers!
One study surveyed more than 520,000 people in 10 European countries, making it the largest study to date on coffee and mortality, and found that drinking more coffee could significantly lower a person’s risk of mortality.
The second study was more novel, as it focused on nonwhite populations. After surveying over 185,000 African-Americans, Native Americans, Hawaiians, Japanese-Americans, Latinos and whites, the researchers found that coffee increases longevity across various races.
Their key finding was that people who drank two to four cups a day had an 18% lower risk of death compared with people who did not drink coffee, according to the study.
Now the really surprising part was that smokers benefitting too from drinking coffee.
Both studies separated smokers from nonsmokers, since smoking is known to reduce lifespan and is linked to various deceases. However, they found that coffee had inverse effects on mortality for smokers too.
“Smoking doesn’t seem to blunt the effects of coffee,” Marc Gunter and lead author of the European study said. “It didn’t matter whether you smoked or not. There was still a potential beneficial affect of coffee on mortality.”
The researchers were clear of course that smoking increases risk of death several-fold. So the healthiest option is to quit smoking. But you knew that.
Summing it all up, Dr. Alberto Ascherio, professor of Epidemiology and Nutrition at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, said:
“I think that the solid conclusion is that if you’re a coffee drinker, keep drinking your coffee and be happy,”
We could not have said it better ourselves!