Physical Wellness

Coffee Could Save Your Life

By Dustin Braden | Update Date: Nov 18, 2015 12:02 PM EST

Coffee is good for more than just making sure you make it to work on time. A new study shows that it has numerous and varied positive effects on a person's long term health.

People who consistently drink coffee are less likely to die from a number of ailments including heart disease, stroke, diabetes, neurological disease, and suicide, The New York Times reports. However, coffee consumption did not seem to have any impact on whether or not a person would die from cancer. The study making the findings public was published in the journal Circulation.

The study looked at 200,000 people over 30 years and controlled for factors such as alcohol consumption, body mass index, age, and other factors and still found that coffee consumption can reduce a person's chance of dying. Smoking was the only factor that had such a negative impact on a person's health it seems to have completely erased any benefits from coffee.

People who drank one cup of coffee daily were 6 percent less likely to die. Those who drank one to three cups were 8 percent less likely to die, people who drank three to five cups saw even greater benefits and were 15 percent less likely to to die.

The correlation between coffee consumption and a lower likelihood of dying is not uniform, however. People who drank more than five cups a day were 12 percent less likely to die, meaning that at a certain point, drinking more coffee isn't doing you any more good.

While the study may seem like great news for coffee addicts, the Harvard researchers behind the project warned that their study was only observational and was unable to say whether the coffee caused the lower likelihood of death, or some other factor was at play.

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