At last, a bit of good news. Coffee, the black elixir brewed, as legend has it, because an Ethiopian herder noticed that after dining on the berries of certain bushes his goats grew friskier and refused to sleep, is good for you.
All studies should be taken with a grain of salt but the recent report on coffee was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of American Medicine, so feel free to sip a guilt-free cup of morning joe or savor a tall glass of iced coffee. Consider the study grounds for having another cup.
“This large prospective cohort study of a half million people found inverse associations for coffee drinking with mortality, including among participants drinking 1 up to 8 or more cups per day,” the study’s authors said. A half-million coffee-loving Brits between the ages of 38 and 73 were tracked for 10 years with physical exams, questionnaires and biological samples. The data collected was then analyzed by researchers at the National Cancer Institute and the National Institutes of Health.
The verdict? People who drank six to seven cups of coffee per day had a 16 percent lower death rate than people who abstained from coffee. People who drank even more coffee had a 14 percent lower mortality rate. Just one cup a day was good for an 8 percent reduction.
The researchers found no difference between those who drank filtered, instant or decaffeinated coffee, which suggests that positive health effects probably come from compounds in the magic beans other than caffeine. Previous studies suggest that drinking tea may also increase longevity, but each beverage appears to have somewhat different, but beneficial, effects on health.
Okay, now for the bad news. Consuming multiple cups of coffee per day, depending on its source, can have a detrimental effect on one’s wallet or purse. Six $4 lattes per day comes out to $8,760 per year. One much ballyhooed survey even concluded that more than one in three Americans spends more on coffee than they save, not counting involuntary contributions to Social Security. American workers, one survey reported, spend about $1,000 per year on coffee or about $20 per week.
Cheapskates, who brew their own and take a thermos to work, spend far less. How much, of course, depends on the coffee – store can from the bottom shelf or top shelf specialty beans, filtered or single-serving cup, brewed in a $2,000 countertop machine or brewed in a $20 drip machine or cone.
A quarter will buy a good cup of home-brewed java or, the kind of people who light their cigars with C-notes could spend $80 or more for a cup if its kopi luwak or black ivory coffee. The beans for the former are run through the digestive system of an Asian palm civet, a cat-like creature that looks more like a weasel, the latter are pre-processed by elephants. Beware, fakes abound, and don’t try to cheat by running coffee beans through your cat.
The study did not investigate the relative health effects of cheap versus costly coffee. All seem to be beneficial, so have another cup.