Coffee may stain your teeth and may leave you with bad breath, but scientists have found that drinking coffee later in life may help you live longer. Research done by the National Cancer Institute in the United States shows that drinking a few cups of coffee a day can significantly reduce your likelihood of dying early.

Doctor Neal Freedman, who worked on the study, says that drinking two to three cups of coffee a day can reduce your chance of dying early by 10 to 15 percent. The study involved people between the ages of 50 and 71 years of age for twelve years and in that time the research yielded some positive results. Doctor Freedman claims that one of the biggest obstacles that the coffee drinkers dealt with was overcoming smoking. Coffee drinkers proved to be more likely to be cigarette smokers in this trial.

“He added that coffee drinking is associated with many behaviours linked to poor health such as drinking too much alcohol, excessive red meat consumption and leading a sedentary lifestyle.

‘All of those risk factors are usually associated with increased risk of death, which they were in our study too,’ he added.

The research did not discover how coffee reduced mortality and Dr Freedman and his colleagues have called for more studies to identify the chemicals in caffeine that may stave off certain conditions.

‘Coffee could be [working by] affecting blood pressure,’ he said.’It is possible that different compounds in the coffee are important, too.’

– Techyville