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Substances in coffee prolongs life
Last reviewed: 01.07.2025
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According to statistics, coffee drinkers suffer less from cardiovascular and infectious diseases compared to those who do not drink coffee.
Coffee not only prevents the development of neurological disorders: if we believe scientists from the National Cancer Institute (USA), it protects us from cardiovascular diseases, strokes, heart attacks and even some infections. And generally prolongs life. Oh, doing this kind of research is a thankless task: where is the guarantee that a person who has lived a hundred years owes his longevity to coffee, and not to two or three years when he had to, on the contrary, give up caffeine for some reason?..
But this time, the researchers called on truly gigantic statistics to help: data on more than 400,000 people who were surveyed by doctors about their coffee consumption back in the mid-1990s. From this gigantic sample, the researchers excluded those who had cancer, heart disease, or other serious illnesses, and then tracked mortality statistics among the remaining healthy people up to 2008. It turned out that those who drank two or more cups of coffee a day died 10-16% less often. According to these statistics, one cup of coffee was already much inferior to two. Moreover, the benefits of coffee were more pronounced in women than in men: women who drank six cups a day died 15% less often, while men died only 10% less often (compared to those who did not drink coffee).
As researchers write in the New England Journal of Medicine, more than two cups of coffee a day have a beneficial effect on the cardiovascular system, reducing the risk of respiratory diseases and diabetes. More than four cups reduce the likelihood of acute heart attacks and infectious diseases. It should be noted that the researchers took into account such factors as body weight, smoking, addiction to alcohol, consumption of red or white meat, and a tendency to fruits and vegetables. Even taking into account that all of this also affects life expectancy, the effect of coffee remained quite noticeable.
And finally, the most important result of the work: as in the case of neurological diseases, the beneficial effect of decaffeinated coffee was exactly the same as that of regular coffee. That is, it is not about caffeine, but about some other biologically active substances present in coffee beans. It would, of course, be very interesting to know what these substances are, but here the researchers foresee great difficulties. Coffee, apparently, prolongs life not because it blocks the path of some one disease. That is, its effect occurs in several directions at once - and this means that it will be very difficult to decipher such a complex mechanism.
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