Coffee helps you grind out a few more years

COFFEE drinkers are a little more likely to live longer, a scientific study suggests.

The US study of 400,000 people should reassure coffee lovers who think it's a guilty pleasure that may do harm.

"There may actually be a modest benefit of coffee drinking," said lead researcher Neal Freedman, of the National Cancer Institute.

But no one knows why. Coffee contains a thousand things that can affect health, from helpful antioxidants to tiny amounts of substances linked to cancer.

The most widely studied ingredient - caffeine - didn't play a role in the new study's results.

Even in the new study, it first seemed that coffee drinkers were more likely to die at any given time.

But they also tended to smoke, drink more alcohol, eat more red meat and exercise less than non-coffee-drinkers.

Once researchers took those things into account, a clear pattern emerged - each cup of coffee per day nudged up the chances of living longer.

The study was done by the US National Institutes of Health and AARP, and the results were published in yesterday's New England Journal of Medicine.

It doesn't prove coffee makes people live longer, only that the two seem related.

Beginning in 1995, it involved AARP members aged 50 to 71.

Of the 402,260 participants, about 42,000 drank no coffee. About 15,000 drank six cups or more a day. Most people had two or three.

By 2008, about 52,000 of them had died. Compared with those who drank no coffee, men who had two or three cups a day were 10 per cent less likely to die at any age. For women, it was 13 per cent.

Even a single cup a day seemed to lower risk a little: 6 per cent in men and 5 per cent in women. The strongest effect was in women who had four or five cups a day - a 16 per cent lower risk of death.