A new study has found that a longer life is linked to any kind of coffee consumption, be it instant, decaf, or your favorite latte…

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This latest research is noteworthy because the researchers tapped into the data of 498,134 British people voluntarily registered with the UK Biobank genetics database, then logged deaths over a 10 year period.

There was a small but statistically significant trend showing that the more coffee people drank, the more likely they were to have longer lives.

“This study provides further evidence that coffee drinking can be part of a healthy diet and offers reassurance to coffee drinkers,” write the researchers.

The inverse association with mortality continued right up to eight cups of coffee a day, suggesting we shouldn’t worry too much about overdoing our coffee consumption. Overall, coffee drinkers were about 10-15 percent less likely to die than coffee abstainers.

As with any observational study like this though, where people are quizzed on their past and existing habits, we can’t definitively say that coffee causes a longer life.

Coffee drinking was inversely associated with mortality, including among those drinking 8 or more cups per day and those with genetic polymorphisms indicating slower or faster caffeine metabolism. These findings suggest the importance of noncaffeine constituents in the coffee-mortality association and provide further reassurance that coffee drinking can be a part of a healthy diet.

These associations were similar for both ground and instant coffee as well and there was no significant difference in risk for people with genetic variants for slower or faster caffeine metabolism.

Researchers noted that coffee beans — not caffeine — may be behind the observed longevity boost.

“My guess is that they’re working together to have some of these benefits,” Harvard researcher Walter Willett, who authored a similar study that found a link between coffee consumption and lower risk of early death, told NPR in 2015. “The coffee bean itself is loaded with many different nutrients and phyto-chemicals,” many of which aid in insulin resistance and inflammation reduction.

Source: 33rd Square