Drinking up to three cups of coffee a day can prolong your life, but only if you drink the right kind. A huge study has some important insights regarding our caffeine habits.
In recent years, the world of science has been discovering the proven benefits of the stimulant drink that most of us need to start our day, even when people said it wasn’t healthy. Now, researchers have changed their minds.
This new study is particularly interesting and important because it was conducted over an entire decade and included close to half a million participants, so the data is comprehensive.
Researchers found that those who regularly drank coffee were 12 percent less likely to die than those who didn’t indulge our favourite habit. Furthermore, the risk of developing heart/cardiovascular disease or stroke was about 20 percent less likely than for those who don’t drink coffee.
But these gratifying findings have an important asterisk to pay attention to. The health benefits stemmed only from drinking coffee from ground beans, not instant coffee. And it's also worth noting that drinking more than three cups of coffee a day didn’t further increase the health benefits.
The study was published in the journal European Journal of Preventive Cardiology and its findings show that those who drank between 0.5 to 3 cups of coffee a day had a 12 percent lower mortality risk at the end of the study period than those who didn’t drink coffee at all.
Coffee drinkers' risk of dying from cardiovascular disease was 17 percent lower than those who didn’t drink coffee, and their risk of having a stroke was 21 percent lower. Coffee consumers were also less likely to become diabetic.