A number of coffee studies from major universities and institutes have recently reached similar conclusions: They suggest that you can drink as much coffee as you want without any particular health issues being raised. The only suggestion is for people to cut out the last cup of coffee each day if sleeping is a problem. So is there a limit to how many cups of coffee you can drink in a day? Drink more coffee for a healthy lifestyle The Institute for Coffee Studies at Vanderbilt University suggests that you can drink as much coffee as you like so long as it doesn’t keep you awake. The thought behind this is that the coffee is healthy and cannot do you any harm, and might help you achieve a healthy lifestyle. The American Medical Association (cited in the New York Times) recommends that a moderate amount of coffee drinking won’t harm your health, providing all other aspects of your lifestyle are healthy and good for you. They further go on to suggest that coffee drinking might prevent Alzheimer’s disease by protecting your liver. The size of the studies that they’ve carried out is significant. They recommend that a moderate amount of caffeine is good for everyone because you can consider it as a nutrient. Harvard’s School of Public Health and the Department of Nutrition has found that coffee drinkers are at a lower risk of suffering from type II diabetes than non-coffee drinkers. Caffeine increases the levels of blood glucose which helps increase the resistance of insulin. Twenty years of studies have shown an 8% decrease in the risk of type II diabetes for women while men show a 4% reduction. For 30 years from the 1980s, data from the Nurses’ Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study followed a large group of people including 80,000 women and 40,000 men. The data is seen as reliable even though it was self reported. Although sugar sweetened beverages do increase the risk of diabetes slightly, it is the preference for sugar and cream that increases the risk of danger. They have found no difference whatsoever between the consumption of regular coffee and decaf in the health of the study groups. 4 or 10 cups a day? The studies show that a number of ingredients in coffee offer biological benefits. They also confirmed that there is no association between moderate coffee consumption and heart failure. During their experiments, while many people drank 4 cups of coffee a day the beneficial effects did not decrease when people increased their consumption beyond 10 cups a day. The studies also developed ideas that caffeine works well as a pain reliever, because many people who worked in offices and usually suffered from back, neck and shoulder problems, experienced less pain when they consumed more coffee. A Japanese study of 550 adults, drinking both coffee and green tea, saw a reduction in the risks associated to coronary artery disease, stroke and type II diabetes. The Harvard School of Public Health follow-up study found that coffee offers a high level of protection to some types of prostate cancer, particularly amongst people who drank six or more cups of coffee per day. The American Society for Nutrition, which studied 500,000 adults, reported that people drinking a high dosage of coffee regularly were effectively fighting colorectal cancer. It would appear that many sensible universities and studies are proving that a good level of coffee consumption certainly won’t kill you. In fact, it may help you live longer. Get your daily caffeine fix from one of our business coffee machines. Image credit: Epsos_de
