Coffee is good for you, more science shows

Even the heaviest coffee drinkers are less likely to die early than people who don't drink coffee, new research finds.It's another piece of good news for coffee lovers, and it gets even better.

It doesn't matter what kind of coffee people drink - that includes decaf and instant coffee. And it also doesn't matter what version of the "coffee gene" people have.

Coffee-drinkers fared better than people who did not drink coffee.The team at the National Cancer Institute used data from people taking part in a large genetic study in Britain called the U.K. Biobank.

More than half a million people volunteered to give blood and answer detailed health and lifestyle questions for ongoing research into genes and health.

The team looked to see who drank coffee, how much and what kind of coffee, and looked for differences in several genes involved in metabolizing caffeine.Then they looked at death rates over 10 years of the study.People who drank coffee, no matter how much or what kind they drank, were less likely to die over that 10-year period than non-coffee drinkers, they reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association's JAMA Internal Medicine.

Even people who said they drank more than eight cups a day were less likely to die, on average, than non-drinkers, the team, led by NCI's Erikka Lotfield, reported.

The volunteers were mostly British and have different coffee-drinking habits than much of the rest of the world. For one thing, they were more likely to drink instant coffee.

Source: NBC News