Connacht Tribune

Loads of coffee – the secret to a long and intensely alert life

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A Different View with Dave O’Connell

Health stories sell papers but normally it’s because they scare readers half to death . . . by telling people all the things that will kill them. Red meat, wine, coffee, burgers, sitting on the couch, driving, stress . . . it’s the gift that keeps on giving.

In a previous existence, I worked in a tabloid ‘red top’ where one of the fixtures on the news list was an item we called ‘coffee can kill you’ – as in, we needed a story as often as possible on that or a related theme.

But the alternative was equally acceptable – particularly if some survey found that a few beers or glasses of wine somehow held the secret to long life. And the truth was that there was someone out there who could produce just such a finding, if you searched hard enough.

Thus, there was another phenomenon where a particular food or drink or lifestyle went around in a perpetual cycle of being both good and bad – one week helping you live to be a century and the next sending you to an early grave.

Which is what drew me to a recent American survey carried out by Dr Erikka Loftfield from the National Institutes of Health in Maryland, who found – believe it or not – that six cups of coffee a day could cut the risk of early death.

Better still, this was a survey of coffee-lovers much closer to home, because it was carried out among almost half a million middle-aged and elderly Britons whose mortality rates were cross-referenced with their coffee intake.

And here’s the good news for the cappuccino brigade; those who drank six or seven cups a day were 16 per cent less likely to die from any disease over a ten-year period than those who never touched coffee.

Those who drank at least eight cups a day saw death rates fall by 14 per cent.

Now one might argue that drinking eight cups of coffee a day would also guarantee two other results – sleepless nights and very regular toilet breaks – but longer life was also a benefit to a lesser degree among moderate and light coffee drinkers.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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