Drinking coffee daily tied to healthy aging among women, study finds
Related video: Could the cost of coffee rise due to tariffs?
(NEXSTAR) – A study presented at the American Society for Nutrition Monday suggests that an eye-opening cup of java may also have long-term health benefits for women.
'Our study has several key strengths,' said Sara Mahdavi, lead researcher and an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto, in a press release. 'In addition to the large sample size and 30 years of follow-up, we assessed several different aspects of longevity and healthy aging as well as very comprehensive information on nutritional and lifestyle habits that were collected every four years after the initiation of the study.'
The study followed 47,513 women using dietary and health data from the Nurses' Health Study dating back to 1984.
While not yet peer-reviewed or published, the supporting data is extensive, experts say, and its conclusion lines up with several other studies that have found coffee to have beneficial effects.
'The data is quite consistent that coffee consumption is actually beneficial,' a Tufts University professor not affiliated with the study told The New York Times.
The study looked at the frequency with which the participants drank coffee, tea, cola or decaffeinated coffee, while accounting for other factors that could influence health aging, such as body weight, smoking, alcohol use, physical activity, education level and protein consumption.
Every four years, researchers collected follow-up information on the participants' nutritional and lifestyle habits, including regular caffeine consumption.
After three decades, there were 3,706 women who met the definition of a health ager: 'living to age 70 or older, being free from 11 major chronic diseases, maintaining physical function, having good mental health, exhibiting no cognitive impairment and showing no memory complaints.'
In mid-life, those same woman consumed, on average, 315 mg of caffeine per day, or about one and a half large cups of coffee. The vast majority of that caffeine intake came from regular coffee, according to the study.
'For women in the healthy agers group, each extra cup of coffee per day was tied to a 2% to 5% higher chance of doing well later in life, up to five small cups per day, or about 2.5 cups according to today's measures,' the news release stated.
Alternatively, researchers found no link between healthy aging and decaffeinated coffee or tea.
'The health benefits apppeared specific to coffee, rather than caffeine more broadly,' Mahdavi told Fox News Digital. 'We didn't see the same associations with decaf coffee, tea or caffeinated soda, suggesting that coffee's unique combination of bioactive compounds may play a key role.'
Caffeinated soda, the study found, lowered participants' chances of healthy aging by 20 percent to 26 percent.
'These results, while preliminary, suggest that small, consistent habits can shape long-term health,' said Mahdavi. 'Moderate coffee intake may offer some protective benefits when combined with other healthy behaviors such as regular exercise, a healthy diet and avoiding smoking. While this study adds to prior evidence suggesting coffee intake may be linked with healthy aging, the benefits from coffee are relatively modest compared to the impact of overall healthy lifestyle habits and warrant further investigation.'
Despite the generous sample size, Mahdavi noted that the study mostly examined the health and habits of white, educated female health professionals.
'Further work is needed to confirm generalizability to broader populations,' she told Fox News Digital, adding that, while the results are positive for coffee drinkers, the study doesn't show a direct causal relationship between the beverage and long-term health.
In other words, there's no guarantee that starting a coffee habit will lead to a healthier aging process, but the study suggests that coffee drinkers don't necessarily need to cut back on the beverage in an attempt to maintain their health as they get older, David Kao, professor of medicine at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical School told CNN.
For those people who aren't already coffee drinkers, or abstain from caffeine, Mahdavi said her team does not recommend taking up the habit.
People with medical concerns including high blood pressure, sleep issues or anxiety, should speak with a healthcare provider before drinking coffee, as it may not be advisable.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CNBC
3 days ago
- CNBC
Harvard study of nearly 50,000 women over 30 years finds coffee drinking linked to healthy aging, longevity: It seems to offer 'protective benefits'
Coffee, and whether or not it's good for you, has been a research focus for decades. A regular cup or two has been linked to better heart health, a longer life, and most recently, a study led by a Harvard researcher, Dr. Sara Mahdavi found that drinking coffee may even aid healthy aging in women. "The findings suggest that caffeinated coffee—not tea or decaf—may uniquely support aging trajectories that preserve both mental and physical function," said Mahdavi, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. The paper, which was presented at the American Society of Nutrition's annual meeting, has not yet been published or peer-reviewed. But the findings are robust. Researchers followed 47,513 women over the course of decades, starting in 1984, and analyzed their health data and coffee-drinking habits. By 2016, only 3,706 participants were considered healthy agers. Factors that the researchers considered to define healthy aging were: The researchers considered additional lifestyle factors like smoking, exercise frequency and diet, and adjusted for their contribution to health outcomes. Participants were also asked to share how often they drank coffee, tea and either Coca-Cola or Pepsi, which can all be sources of caffeine. Women who had at least one cup of coffee daily were more likely to be among the healthy agers, the study found. Of the healthy agers, each extra cup of coffee they had each day was associated with a 2% to 5% increased chance of aging well, peaking at about five small cups a day. Drinking tea or decaffeinated coffee didn't have a clear connection to healthy aging in the study, and drinking cola drastically lowered chances of positive health outcomes. How much coffee per day leads to healthy aging is debatable. Mahdavi says drinking up to seven small cups of coffee daily was associated with healthy aging in the study, but whether or not that amount is healthy can shift depending on the person. Other recent studies have pointed to the potential health benefits of drinking coffee. A recent study of nearly 50,000 U.S. adults published this May found that having one to three cups of coffee a day could lower a person's chances of dying by around 15% within the following nine to 11 years, in comparison to those who didn't consume the drink. "Moderate coffee intake may offer some protective benefits when combined with other healthy behaviors such as regular exercise, a healthy diet and avoiding smoking," Mahdavi said in a press release. "While this study adds to prior evidence suggesting coffee intake may be linked with healthy aging, the benefits from coffee are relatively modest compared to the impact of overall healthy lifestyle habits and warrant further investigation."
Boston Globe
3 days ago
- Boston Globe
Harvard has collected 3 million biological samples over decades. Now researchers may not have the money to preserve them.
The samples are kept at temperatures as low as minus-170 degrees Celsius (or minus-274 degrees Fahrenheit), in a network of liquid nitrogen freezers at the Chan School as well as at Brigham and Women's Hospital, according to 'If we really don't have any funding, we would lose the samples,' said Dr. Walter Willett, a Harvard professor and a principal investigator for the studies, in an interview. 'We're doing everything possible to not let that happen.' Advertisement The two programs affected are among the most comprehensive and long-running public health studies in the country. The Nurses' Health Study is A similar project, the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study, tracks lifestyle and nutrition factors for men. Advertisement The two projects have yielded a number of landmark findings, including the link between alcohol consumption and breast cancer and the effects of trans fats on heart disease. The dataset generated from the massive project has informed countless additional studies by other researchers. Related : As part of the projects, researchers collected biological samples from roughly 350,000 individuals, monitoring various components, including nutrients, contaminants, and hormone levels. That research has been crucial to the growing understanding of factors that contribute to breast cancer, heart disease, and dementia, Willett said. 'Looking at what's going on inside the body a few decades before the disease occurs, that's what we can do [with the samples],' he said. 'That's really critical, because we know for many cancers, it's not what's in the blood or in the urine at the time of diagnosis, it's what was going on decades before that's probably most important. And we can go back to the samples and look at that today.' The collection of samples is among the most comprehensive in the world, Willett said. Its scientific potential — which will only increase as new research technologies are developed — is something that 'no amount of money can buy,' he added. Related : Both projects were funded in large part by two grants issued by the National Institute of Health's National Cancer Institute. Those grants were terminated on May 6, according to an affidavit filed by Willett June 2. Now, researchers are scrambling to keep the freezers running. Advertisement 'We have probably a couple of months worth of resources for paying our nitrogen bills,' Willett said. 'But the nitrogen company is very efficient in cutting off supply if we don't pay.' Though it's not clear exactly when the funding will run out, Willett said the research team may soon have to decide which samples are kept and which will be allowed to spoil. But because the sweeping nature of the study relies on having multiple samples from hundreds of thousands of people over a multi-year period, it's difficult to say which will be more useful for research purposes. 'We don't yet know who's going to get breast cancer,' Willett said. 'Which makes it impossible to predict exactly which samples will be the most valuable.' Nicole Romero examines samples on the campus of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health on June 11, 2025. Kent Dayton/Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Camilo Fonseca can be reached at
Medscape
4 days ago
- Medscape
Diabetes Plus Asthma Equals Greater Metabolic Risk
People with both diabetes and asthma appear to face greater metabolic risks than those with either condition alone, according to new observational data. In a study of more than 18,000 participants from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey during 2001-2020, individuals with both asthma and diabetes (most presumed to have type 2 diabetes) had significantly greater impairments in glucose regulation, insulin sensitivity, and lipid metabolism compared with those who had only one condition alone or neither. Inflammatory markers C-reactive protein (CRP) and high-sensitivity CRP (hs-CRP) were also elevated in the comorbid group, 'supporting a hypothesis of a shared inflammatory mechanism,' Sixtus Aguree, PhD, assistant professor at the Indiana University School of Public Health-Bloomington, and colleagues wrote in a poster presented at NUTRITION 2025, the annual meeting of the American Society for Nutrition. The findings 'emphasize the need for integrated clinical strategies that simultaneously target both inflammation and metabolic dysfunction in patients with asthma-diabetes comorbidity,' the authors wrote. 'Routine screening for insulin resistance and inflammatory markers in [these] patients may aid in early intervention and risk reduction.' This points to the need for integrated clinical care, Aguree told Medscape Medical News . 'For managing these comorbid conditions, healthcare professionals need to work together. I think that's a better way to treat the person than working in silos.' Bidirectional Relationship Commenting on the findings, Tianshi David Wu, MD, assistant professor of pulmonary and critical care at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, told Medscape Medical News that these findings align with current evidence. 'Diabetes and asthma have a bidirectional relationship,' Wu explained. 'Population studies have shown that patients with diabetes are at higher risk of developing asthma later on, and vice versa. What's still unknown are the mechanisms that explain this finding.' Wu added that the researchers had put forth a reasonable hypothesis — that systemic inflammation may play a key role in this association. 'The best way to prove this would be with a trial that specifically targets the type of inflammation you think is driving both asthma and diabetes to see how it affects these conditions.' As a possible blueprint, he pointed to cardiology, where patients with heart failure and diabetes are preferentially treated with sodium-glucose cotransporter-2 inhibitors, which are effective at treating both conditions. 'In the asthma world, I don't think the evidence is there yet to recommend any specific diabetes medication, but there is plenty of real-world data suggesting some benefit, and there are two clinical trials ongoing testing semaglutide and metformin to see if they can improve asthma,' Wu said. Surprising Impact on Insulin Resistance The study included 18,370 nationally representative US adults. Among them, 8.2% had diabetes without asthma, 7.4% had asthma without diabetes, 83.3% had neither (controls), and 1.2% had both. BMI was highest in the combined asthma-diabetes group (35.9 kg/m2 vs. 28.2 kg/m2 in controls, P < .001), as was waist circumference (117.6 cm vs. 97.3 cm, P < .001). Insulin resistance, defined as a homeostasis model assessment of insulin resistance (HOMA-IR) > 2.5, was present in 41% of controls, 46.8% with asthma only, 77.3% with diabetes only, and 85.6% with both conditions. The HOMA-IR score in the asthma-diabetes group was significantly higher than in controls (9.85 vs. 2.96, P < .001). Logistic regression analysis confirmed that the odds of insulin resistance were nearly eight times higher in the asthma-diabetes group than in the control group (odds ratio [OR], 7.89, P < .001), even after adjusting for BMI, sex, and medication use. 'We didn't expect insulin resistance to be that much higher in the combination of asthma and diabetes. That shocked us,' Aguree said. Asthma alone was not significantly associated with insulin resistance (OR, 0.76, P = .220), 'underscoring the additive impact of coexisting diabetes,' the authors wrote in their poster. Additional Metabolic Outcomes Absolute values of LDL cholesterol were 115.9 mg/dL and 114.5 mg/dL, respectively, for controls and asthma only, vs 98.9 mg/dL and 104.8 mg/dL for diabetes only and asthma-diabetes groups, respectively. The lower value in those with diabetes is likely due to greater use of statins, Aguree noted. In contrast, compared with controls, those in the asthma-diabetes group had significantly lower levels of HDL cholesterol, while triglycerides and the triglyceride/HDL ratio were higher ( P < .001 for all). Systolic blood pressure was also significantly higher in the comorbid group ( P < .001), as was diastolic blood pressure, although to a lesser extent ( P = .012). A1c levels were 5.41% in controls and 5.46% in the asthma-only group, both significantly lower than levels in the diabetes group (7.34%) and the comorbid group (7.11%), Aguree said. Log-CRP values were 0.530 units higher in the asthma-diabetes group than in controls ( P < .001), as were hs-CRP (1.70 mg/L vs 0.60 mg/L, P < .001). Aguree and colleagues are now expanding their analysis to include longitudinal data and evaluate integrated interventions, such as combined anti-inflammatory and glucose-lowering medications, as a means of reducing the burden of both conditions. Aguree had no disclosures. Wu declared receiving funding from the National Institutes of Health and the American Lung Association.
