New Study: Coffee Drinkers Live Longer; But Why?

Some time ago we covered some benefits of drinking coffee; aside from the jolt of caffeine, coffee is an active source of a multitude of complex chemicals and antioxidants that are beneficial to your health. 

Now in a recent post by the very "LIKED" and "SHARED" story feed / web tech aggregator that is Gizmodo, it's reported that people that drink lots of coffee (up to 6 cups a day) were 10% less likely to die, during the term of the study v.s. the non-coffee drinkers. However, the benifits were noticed among those that were heavy drinkers of the stuff; drinking a single cup a day was found to not make the same amount of % difference. 

"The large-scale study, which is published in the New England Journal of Medicine, showed that men who drank six cups of coffee or more every day were 10 per cent less likely to die during the 14 years of the study. Women who drank six cups or more were 15 per cent less likely to die over that same period. The result, fairly obviously, suggests that coffee drinkers live longer.

The researchers have also shown that the effect is seen across almost all causes of death, including heart disease, respiratory disease, stroke, diabetes, and infections. The effect, however, seems to decline with lower consumption—and a single cup of coffee a day was found to have negligible effect." - Gawker 

"Coffee contains more than 1000 compounds that might affect the risk of death. The most well-studied compound is caffeine, although similar associations for caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee in the current study and a previous study suggest that, if the relationship between coffee consumption and mortality were causal, other compounds in coffee—for example, antioxidants, including polyphenols—might be important."-National Cancer Institute

Read the original study here: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1112010