Drinking moderate coffee in middle age may support healthier aging in women!
A 30-year study of over 47,000 women in the US found that women who drank a moderate amount of coffee in their middle age were more likely to age in a healthy way as they stayed physically active, mentally sharp, and had fewer serious health problems.
Sara Mahdavi, nutrition scientist at Harvard University and the University of Toronto issued a statement in which she said, “While past studies have linked coffee to individual health outcomes, our study is the first to assess coffee’s impact across multiple domains of aging over three decades,” according to ScienceAlert.
“The findings suggest that caffeinated coffee – not tea or decaf – may uniquely support aging trajectories that preserve both mental and physical function,” she shared.
To find out if drinking coffee helps with healthy aging, researcher Sara Mahdavi and her team studied data from a long-term project called the Nurses’ Health Study, which looks at nurses’ health in the US.
They used information collected from 1984 to 2016 about what the nurses ate and how healthy they were.
By 2016, they found 3,706 women who met the healthy aging conditions. Most of the caffeine these women drank — about 80% of it — came from 3 small cups of coffee each day.
Regular coffee had a positive effect on healthy aging, while tea and decaffeinated coffee had no noticeable impact—they neither helped nor harmed.
On the other hand, drinking cola was linked to a negative effect on health as people aged.
Women who were aging in a healthy way saw a small benefit from drinking coffee — each extra cup (up to five cups a day) increased their chances of staying healthy by 2 to 5 percent.
But for people who drank cola, each cup a day actually reduced their chances of healthy aging by 20 to 26 percent, which is a big negative effect.
However, the researcher, Mahdavi, said that coffee is not a miracle solution for health. It might help a little, but to age well, people still need to follow other healthy habits — like eating well, exercising regularly, and avoiding smoking.
