Drinking lots of coffee is safe

May 09, 2006

GO ahead and have that second cup of coffee – or third, or fourth. A study published recently shows heavy, long-term coffee drinking does not raise the risk of heart disease for most people.

GO ahead and have that second cup of coffee – or third, or fourth. A study published recently shows heavy, long-term coffee drinking does not raise the risk of heart disease for most people.
The study, which followed 128,000 men and women for as long as 20 years, showed that drinking filtered coffee – not espresso or French-style brews – did not raise the risk of heart disease.
“We believe this study clearly shows there is no association between filtered coffee consumption and coronary heart disease,” said Esther Lopez-Garcia, an instructor in the School of Medicine at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid in Spain, who worked on the study. “This lack of effect is good news because coffee is one of the most widely consumed beverages in the world.”
Researchers also found no link between heart disease and how much caffeine, tea or decaffeinated coffee people drank.
“But this does not mean that everyone can overload on coffee with impunity,” said Rob van Dam of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston. “We can’t exclude the association between coffee consumption and the risk (of heart disease) in small groups of people,” van Dam said in a statement.
In March, a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that people with a “slow” version of a particular liver enzyme gene had a higher risk of heart disease if they drank more coffee, compared to those with a fast-metabolising version. Liver enzymes metabolise coffee and many other compounds.
The Harvard and Madrid teams used data from two ongoing studies – the all-male Health Professionals Follow-up Study, which began in 1986, and the all-female Nurses’ Health Study, which started in 1976.
Reuters
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