Coffee even decafe & instant are associated with longer life

Coffee: still tasty and reportedly healthy for us. According to a study published this week, drinking decaffeinated, ground, and instant coffee on a light to moderate basis may reduce your risk of cardiovascular disease and early death. However, as is frequently the case, these results do not prove a causal link between coffee consumption and health. Australian researchers examined information from the UK Biobank, a long-running study that monitors the well-being of its citizens. Volunteers provided specifics about their eating patterns at the beginning of the experiment, including how much and what kind of coffee they typically drank. Over a 12-year follow-up period, the researchers monitored the health and death of roughly 450,000 volunteers over the age of 40 who had no documented cardiovascular disease at the start of the trial. Coffee drinkers were generally less likely to acquire cardiovascular disease and to pass away from any cause than non-coffee drinkers. However, the linked advantages were shown to vary slightly depending on the quantity and type of coffee consumed. The biggest mortality decreases were shown in those who drank two to three cups of decaffeinated, ground, or instant coffee per day. Ground and instant coffee drinkers had the lowest risk of developing arrhythmia or an abnormal heartbeat, but decaf drinkers did not experience any protective effects. On Monday, the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology published the findings. Many research, including one that similarly evaluated UK Biobank data and was released last May, have found that drinking coffee is generally beneficial for people. But according to the authors, their study is one of the few to focus particularly on the kind of coffee consumers are consuming. They contend that their findings show that the advantages of coffee may originate from other substances and possibly from the preparation process as well as from the ingestion of caffeine. Diterpenes are fatty substances that are more prevalent in brewed ground coffee that is not filtered, and some data suggest that they may increase the risk of LDL cholesterol (the "bad" variety). “Caffeine is the most well-known constituent in coffee, but the beverage contains more than 100 biologically active components. It is likely that the non-caffeinated compounds were responsible for the positive relationships observed between coffee drinking, cardiovascular disease and survival,” said study author Peter Kistler, a researcher at the Baker Heart and Diabetes Research Institute in Melbourne, in a statement from the European Society of Cardiology, the journal’s publishers.