I love my coffee. Like most Americans, the day just doesn’t start without a couple of cups. Once I thought of it as a guilty pleasure, but a growing body of research is now showing us that coffee has a wide variety of health benefits backed by new studies, including an impressive antioxidant profile. Believe me, these new laboratory findings are hard to ignore.
The feminine advantage
Women who are habitual coffee drinkers may actually have a big edge over other women who don’t like coffee that much. In a recent study, the results suggest that women who consume several cups of coffee every day — and have done so for years or even decades — have reduced risk of uterine cancer. That’s a good reason for us to drink more coffee, don’t you think?
A report from researchers at Harvard University yielded some interesting new ways to look at our java habit: Analyzing data accumulated for 26 years of 67,470 women ages 34 to 59, women who drank four or more cups of coffee a day had a 25% lower risk of endometrial cancer than those who drank no coffee. The study also reflects a 7% lower risk for those who drank just tow or three cups of coffee a day.
It is believed that drinking coffee can lower levels of estrogen and insulin. This resulted from data gathered from a previous research, which also supports the idea that high levels of both hormones have been connected to endometrial cancer.
More benefits of coffee drinking
In another study, Swedish researchers found that drinking two or more cups of coffee daily lowers the risk of breast cancer recurrence. The University of Lund found that patients who used Tamoxifen after an initial breast cancer treatment and drank two cups of coffee or more every day experienced less than 50% of the rate of cancer recurrence compared to those who took the pill and drank one or less cup of coffee a day.
In this particular study, researchers tested the impact of drinking coffee on tumor characteristics and risk for early developments related to breast cancer treatment and CYP1A2 and CYP2C8 genotypes.
Java is good for the guys, too
Still more good news about enjoying our daily coffee:
Harvard researchers found that of 48,000 men they studied, the more coffee they drank, the lower their risk to have prostate cancer. Men who drank six or more cups of coffee on a daily basis were 60% less likely to have prostate cancer compared to men who don’t drink coffee at all or drank it only occasionally. That’s great news for guys. The same group of coffee lovers has a 20% lower risk factor for all kinds of cancer.
Clearly, the antioxidants in coffee are effective against runaway hormones that are major contributors to these hormonal-related cancers. No doubt future research will increase our understanding of the factors at work here.
There, coffee lovers, we all now have more reasons to celebrate!
