Another week and another publication about coffee consumption. This one published ahead of print on the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition website gives a familiar story, drinking coffee seems to be inversely related with chance of death.
This time the subjects of the research were from Japan, nearly 91,000 people between the ages of 40 – 69 years had their health status followed for just less than 19 years.
The researches stated that although there have been studies on associations between coffee consumption and cardiovascular disease or cancer, they wanted to look at coffee consumption compared to the 5 highest reasons for death in Japan: cancer, heart disease, cerebrovascular disease (problems with blood flow to the brain), respiratory disease, and total injury.
They found an inverse relationship between 3 of the highest reasons of death: heart disease, cerebrovascular disease, and respiratory disease. Interestingly, they did not find that drinking too much coffee, e.g. more than 5 cups a day was related to an increased chance of death than drinking less coffee.
They suggest that as a high proportion people who drink so much coffee also tend to smoke this may have impacted the results in previous studies. And there I was thinking it was standard practise to adjust data due to factors such as this…