Health Benefits of Coffee
- Coffee is the most widely-consumed pharmacologically-active beverage in the world.
- Long suspected to be associated with poor health outcomes, coffee has now been shown to have a myriad of health benefits when consumed in moderation.
- Drinking up to five cups of coffee daily can protect you against many chronic, age-related diseases.
- Recent studies highlight coffee’s ability to boost endothelial function and reduce the risks of stroke and heart disease.
- Coffee and its components offer protection against diabetes, itself the cause of degraded endothelial function and cardiovascular diseases and cancer.
- Coffee helps protect against cancer and neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.
- In today’s world, there’s every reason to drink coffee liberally, not only without guilt, but secure in the knowledge that you are improving your health and preventing disease with every cup.
Coffee Cuts Cancer Risk
Cancer researchers bashed coffee-drinking for years because they believed it contributed to the growth of tumors.28 But now there’s substantial epidemiological evidence showing that coffee consumption in fact reduces the risk of many tumors.29 This is especially true of breast cancer.
Breast cancer is a very well-studied malignancy in terms of its relationship to coffee, in part because the same liver enzymes are involved in the metabolism of coffee compounds and estrogen, as well as the breast cancer drug tamoxifen.30,31
Coffee helps prevent the development of breast cancer by favorably increasing the ratio of estrogen’s protective metabolite2-hydroxyestrone compared to its more dangerous metabolite called 16-hydroxyestrone. An increase in 2-hydroxyestrone and reduction in 16-hydroxyestrone results in a hormonal environment less favorable to breast cancer development.32
Studies have now shown that coffee consumption slows the growth of treatable estrogen receptor-positive breast cancer, resulting in an older age at diagnosis.33 And among women with known cancer-causing mutations, consumption of caffeinated coffee is associated with a significant reduction in breast cancer risk.31
In one study, intake of at least 5 cups of coffee per day reduced breast cancer risk by 29%, reduced the risk of difficult-to-treat estrogen receptor-negative tumors by 59%, and reduced postmenopausal breast cancer by 37%. 34 This study found no impact of other caffeine-containing beverages, again highlighting the importance of the non-caffeine components of coffee.
