Coffee lovers tend to live longer with less cancer risks — study

MANILA, Philippines — There are now more reasons to drink coffee as a seven-year study in Guangzhou, China suggested that coffee lovers tend to have less health risks and are less likely to die of cancer and heart disease. 

Researchers from Southern Medical University found out that your daily coffee habit may help you live a longer, healthier life, even if you add sugar, as recently published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. The researchers in China aimed to test whether that was true even when people add sugar to their daily brew. 

The study looked on the data on coffee habits and health from more than 171,000 residents of the United Kingdom, who didn't have cancer or heart disease at the start of the study, over a period of seven years. 

People who drank slightly sweetened coffee lived longer, too, so adding sugar may not be unhealthy. 

They found that people who regularly drank unsweetened coffee were 16 to 21% less likely to die during the study than their peers who didn't drink coffee. 

Study participants who had between one and four cups of lightly sweetened coffee per day were 29 to 31% less likely to die during the study, according to the data.

The evidence, however, doesn't necessarily endorse highly sugary coffee drinks as healthy, according to an accompanying editorial by Harvard professor Dr. Christina Wee on Southern Medical University's study. Participants added about a teaspoon of sugar per cup, on average, much less than the amount of sweetener typically found in prepared or blended coffee drinks.

Previous studies also suggested that coffee drinkers live longer because they have a lower risk of illnesses like heart disease, cancer and diabetes. The findings are supported by previous evidence that coffee is generally beneficial for longevity, no matter how you drink it. Coffee has evidence-based benefits for physical health, and even mental health. Caffeine appears to be linked to a decreased risk of Parkinson's disease. The beverage is also tied to a lower risk of depression and suicide. 

According to the Mayo Clinic, you can't still have too much caffeine, however. Doses of more than 400 milligrams of caffeine (more than about four to five cups of coffee) can cause minor side effects like anxiety, jitters, rapid heart rate and sweating.

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