According to a decade-long study, if you drink three cups of coffee every day, chances are, you’ll live longer!
More precisely, the researchers concluded that people who drink coffee regularly are 12 percent less likely to pass away early on.
And that’s not even all! They were also up to 50 percent less likely to develop cardiovascular disease or suffer a stroke as per the results of the same long term study.
However, it is important to keep in mind that all of these promising results came from consuming ground coffee and not any instant varieties.
There’s no doubt that coffee is one of the most popular drinks on the planet, with a large consumption among the adult population and it makes perfect sense as to why!
That being said, there have been many contradictory studies on whether it is beneficial or detrimental to one’s health before!
Aside from caffeine, a coffee drink also contains antioxidants and minerals and some studies have linked it to a lowered risk of being diagnosed with dementia, type 2 diabetes and even cancer!
On the other hand, different studies have concluded that it also comes with a high risk of developing high blood pressure and even passing away from cardiovascular disease.
This new study, conducted by a team of academics from Semmelweis University in Hungary and from the Queen Mary University of London, shows that coffee does not increase blood pressure and that it actually comes with a number of cardiovascular benefits.
One of the authors from Queen Mary’s, Dr. Steffen Petersen, stated that the results of the research show that moderate consumption of coffee “is not cardiovascularly harmful and may even be beneficial. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest volume of research to date focusing on the cardiovascular effects of coffee consumption.”
Those who participated in the study were taken from the UK Biobank with an average age of 56 years old and did not suffer from any heart disease when the study first started.
These volunteers were then monitored for no less than 11 years, a long enough period of time that allowed experts to see the differences between groups like never before.
What they found was that among all participants, 22 percent were non-coffee drinkers while 58 percent drank up to three cups every single day.
According to the research that was published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, the rest of the participants admitted to drinking at least three cups per day.
All in all, the study was able to conclude that those who consumed between 0.5-3 cups per day on average were 12 percent less likely to die than those who did not drink coffee by the end of the 11 years old study.
Furthermore, they were 17 percent less likely to pass away of cardiovascular disease and 21 percent less likely to suffer a stroke when compared to non-coffee drinkers.
They were even less likely to be diagnosed with diabetes than those who do not drink coffee.
While this study did not focus on figuring out why this is the case, caffeine is already known to suppress appetite which usually leads to lower rates of obesity and all of the health conditions that come with it.
Another interesting finding of the study was that those who consumed more than three cups of coffee every day did not run a higher risk of developing high blood pressure either, something older studies seemed to be concerned about.
However, they did have quite similar rates of cardiovascular disease and mortality to those who did not drink coffee regularly, which suggests that three cups per day is the maximum recommended amount for people to get any health benefits from this habit of consuming coffee.
The study managed to also suppress previous concerns that coffee triggers an increase in high blood pressure rates as the researchers did not detect such changes among the participants.
As mentioned before, however, it is important to know that not all coffee drinks are made equal when it comes to your health!
When the group of researchers looked at the health benefits based on the type of coffee the volunteers consumed, they were able to conclude that the instant coffee fans, which amounted to about a quarter of the total number of participants, did not gain any health benefits from drinking it.
The experts mentioned that this is most likely because of the differences in how the coffee is made.
As you may be aware, instant coffee contains more antioxidants and caffeine but unfortunately, also twice as much acrylamide!
Acrylamide is a substance usually found in some foods that has been linked to an increase in the risk of developing cancer as well as nervous system damage.
The researchers mentioned that coffee’s positive effect could be linked to changes in the heart structure among people who consume this caffeinated drink.
This conclusion was reached thanks to looking at cardiovascular MRI scans which were available for no less than 30,000 of the participants.
What they saw by doing this was that there were clear signs regular coffee drinkers had healthier hearts than those who didn’t consume coffee.
More precisely, people who drank a moderate or even a high amount of coffee had larger ventricles which means that their hearts were also able to pump out more oxygenated blood throughout the body.
