Still unsure if Arabica beans are nature’s way of saying humans are supposed to live forever? Well, in addition to maybe preventing liver disease, cancer, and erectile dysfunction, scientists say there’s exciting new proof coffee might make your heart healthier. In findings presented to the American Heart Association yesterday, University of Colorado researchers say they essentially stumbled upon this great news by digging through an important, very-long-running data set on American eating patterns and cardiovascular health.
The plan was to find dietary habits that help mitigate the risk of heart disease — and, according to Time, “one stood out after the analysis.” Per their findings, drinking coffee daily was linked to less heart failure, less stroke, and less coronary heart disease. Subjects who consumed an eight-ounce cup every day lowered their risk of each by 8 percent, 7 percent, and 5 percent, respectively. Moreover, the reduction repeated again with every new cup — all the way up to six.
Granted, it’s preliminary research that hasn’t appeared in a peer-reviewed journal yet, but based on these researchers’ and others’ findings, there’s mounting evidence that coffee’s combo of caffeine, natural antioxidants, and anti-inflammatory effects somehow helps fight off awful cardiovascular conditions. For their study, researchers took the Framingham Heart Study — which began in the ’40s, and now includes over 15,000 people — and designed a special algorithm to detect data patterns, then corroborated their findings by finding the same pattern in two other major studies (the Cardiovascular Heart Study and the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities Study).
As always, this only suggests a link, but in this case, the ambiguity could even be in coffee’s favor: 97 percent of subjects drank fewer than seven cups per day, meaning that researchers “can’t know for sure” if the benefits keep replicating at even higher levels of consumption.