HT: Josephine Marcotty, StarTribune.com
Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health studied the histories of 125,000 men and women who reported how much coffee they drank between 1980 and 2004. The more coffee they drank, the less likely they were to die from a heart attack or cardiovascular disease. That was especially true for women. Compared to those who didn’t drink coffee, those who drank 5 to 7 cups per week had 7 percent lower risk for death. The real coffee addicts who drink 4 to 5 cups per day had a 26 percent lower risk of death. The lower risk was mostly related to heart disease, but cancer deaths in women were lower, too, the researchers found.
It’s not the caffeine that does it because they found a similar pattern in the people who drank decaffeinated coffee.
So what’s going on? Antioxidants, they think. Like blue berries, green tea and chocolate, coffee contains antioxidants. Those are the chemicals that bond snag the free-floating molecules in our bodies called free radicals. Free radicals, created by the body’s natural metabolic processes like breathing and digesting food, are culprits in aging and disease. In particular, they are related to the inflammatory process that causes plaque to build up in our arteries, causing cardiovascular disease.
Read the full article here, though I didn’t care for the commenter who noted that “anything more than 2 cups of coffee is linked to brain deterioration“. My wife doesn’t need any more ammunition…
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