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Drink your coffee — it’s GOOD for you!

August 21, 2005

I occasionally get grief from well-meaning friends as to how drinking coffee is supposed to be bad for you. Maybe this is a leftover from childhood warnings (my parents always told me that coffee would “stunt my growth” — it didn’t then, and doesn’t seem to yet, more’s the pity), or from the “caffeine is bad for you” meme that seems to be coming from the people selling decaf…

In any event, much like green tea, and then tea in general before it, coffee now seems to be getting some respect from the medical community as actually being good for you…

Here are just a few random cites from the news recently…

Coffee and Liver Cancer (from CancerPage)

In the current study, researchers found that men and women who drank at least one cup of coffee a day were less likely to develop liver cancer than those who drank little or none.

Compared with occasional coffee drinkers, habitual drinkers were 29 percent less likely to develop liver cancer over the 7 to 9 years the researchers followed them. And in comparison to their peers who never drank coffee, their liver cancer risk was 42 percent lower, according to findings published in the International Journal of Cancer.

Coffee and Diabetes (from WebMD)

People who drank the most coffee had the lowest risk of type 2 diabetes.

They downed at least six or seven cups of coffee per day. They were 35 percent less likely to develop type 2 diabetes as those who drank less than two cups of coffee daily.

Those who drank four to six cups per day had a 28 percent lower risk of type 2 diabetes, compared with people who drank the least coffee, say the researchers.

Similar patterns were seen in six other studies. Those were one-time-only checks; they didn’t track diabetes risk over time. More than 17,000 people took part in those projects.

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Written by Chuck Lawson · Filed Under Caffeine 
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