The jury might still be out, but did a recent EU study yielded enough data that hinted that by drinking three cups of coffee a day could make you live longer?
By: Ringo Bones
When the results of the study got the interest of the
so-called mainstream media during the second week of July 2017, coffee drinkers
/ coffee aficionados around the world finally got the vindication that they
need that coffee drinking is a very healthy lifestyle choice. The “convoluted
statistics” of the study even manage to suggest that a cup of coffee could
extend one’s life expectancy by as much as nine minutes – an apparent
declaration harking back to the anti smoking campaign of then US Surgeon
General C. Everett Koop perhaps where a single stick of cigarette could shorten
your life by as much as three minutes. But is the coffee drinking extending
your life expectancy study scientifically valid – or is it just a bunch of
baloney?
The latest of the two studies were done with the
participation of almost half a million people from 10 European countries. The
research, published in the journal the Annals of Internal Medicine, suggests an
extra cup of coffee could lengthen a person’s lifespan – even if it’s
decaffeinated. According to the study, researchers from the International
Agency for Research on Cancer and Imperial College London say they have found
that drinking more coffee is linked to a lower risk of death – particularly for
heart diseases and diseases of the gut. They came to their conclusions after
analyzing data of half a million people over the age of 35 from 10 EU
countries. During the 16-year duration of the study, the researchers asked the
research participants at the beginning of the study on how much coffee they
tended to drink and then looked at their deaths over an average of 16 years.
Based on the published research data, Prof. Sir David Spiegelhalter,
from the University of Cambridge, who analyses the public understanding of risk
and says that if the estimated reductions in death really were down to coffee,
then an extra cup of coffee every day would extend the life of a man by around
three months and a woman by around a month on average. But despite the sheer
scale of the study in terms of duration and participants, it is by no means
perfect and cannot prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that coffee beans were
the magic ingredient to a longer lifespan.
One of the factors that the research study overlooked is on
the difference of how much money is earned between the coffee drinking and non
coffee drinking participants of the study. The coffee drinking participants of
the study on average might have earned much more than their non coffee drinking
participants and can afford better doctors and thus might play a factor in the
extended lifespan during the 16-year duration of the study. It might also be
that people who drank three cups of coffee a day spent more time socializing
with people of like interests and thus boosting their well-being. The researchers
also found higher coffee-drinking was linked to a higher rate of ovarian cancer
in women.
The most rigorous scientific way to be certain that coffee
could make you live longer would be to force thousands of people all over the
world to drink it regularly while preventing many thousands of otherwise similar
people from ever drinking coffee. Scientists would then have to monitor every
other aspect of their life – what else they ate and drank, how much they
earned, how much they exercise they did for example. A study this rigorous is
never likely to take place anytime soon.
