Thursday, August 17, 2006

Hah! It's Not an Addiction--It's a Health Food!

As if you needed any more excuse to down coffee on a daily basis (make mine iced!), two mainly* Boston-based researchers in a recent issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, say: Yep, it's good for ya.

The NYTimes (citing the JAMA article) agrees:
Coffee is not usually thought of as health food, but a number of recent studies suggest that it can be a highly beneficial drink. Researchers have found strong evidence that coffee reduces the risk of several serious ailments, including diabetes, heart disease and cirrhosis of the liver.

It's particularly good in warding off the type 2 diabetes:
Larger quantities of coffee seem to be especially helpful in diabetes prevention. In a report that combined statistical data from many studies, researchers found that people who drank four to six cups of coffee a day had a 28 percent reduced risk compared with people who drank two or fewer. Those who drank more than six had a 35 percent risk reduction.

My hubby, the Ph.D. in applied math (mainly probability) says this is HUGE reduction in risk, not just one of those slight gains that often get overhyped in the press.

BTW, does it surprise you that most of the work was done in the Hub? We can't live without our joe! (Make mine iced!)

*JAMA author Affiliations: Department of Nutrition and Health, Faculty of Earth and Life Sciences, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands (Dr van Dam); Department of Nutrition (Drs van Dam and Hu) and Department of Epidemiology (Dr Hu), Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, Mass; Channing Laboratory, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, Mass (Dr Hu).

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Good news! Like I need another reason to tip the balance from green tea to coffee. But wait! "Four to six cups of coffee a day"? Holy cow! I'd have bigger problems than diabetes if I was wired on that much coffee every day! I'm curious, how much coffee do you drink? I try to keep it to one in the morning, possibly another in the afternoon if it's a particularly busy day at work. I never drank coffee until I moved here and I saw the Dunkin culture. It was a big relief when I went to visit my parents after I started coffee and it seemed like overnight DnD opened everywhere in the West Palm area. yeah!

9:24 AM  
Blogger Fraulein said...

Thank God for that, huh? At least I'm ingesting something healthy.

8:13 AM  
Blogger Rebecca said...

See, I just KNEW I was ahead of the curve with my fixation on coffee. ;)

8:43 AM  

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