For Your Liver's Sake, You Should Probably Keep Drinking Coffee
More than half of American grown-ups drink coffee every day. Their non-sipping counterparts may want to follow suit.
The health benefits associated with drinking coffee are plenty: The brew is packed with antioxidants and downing a cup can help wake up the brain and make a person feel more alert and focused. A new report published by the World Cancer Research Fund found that the apparently magical liquid can also decrease a person's risk for liver cancer.
The numbers are pretty significant: Researchers found that a consistent love for coffee could lower liver cancer risk by 14 percent. As part of ongoing research for the Continuous Update Project, a research team at Imperial College London analyzed 34 existing global studies about how diet, nutrition, physical activity and weigh relate to cancer risk and survival. Collectively, the studies covered approximately 8.2 million adults and 24,500 cases of liver cancer. Researchers are not sure why coffee might protect against the disease, but they hypothesized that certain compounds in the beverage could help to fight toxins. "Both coffee and coffee extracts have also been shown to reduce the expression of genes involved in inflammation, and the effects appear to be most pronounced in the liver," the report reads.
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Drinking coffee — even decaffeinated coffee — may protect your liver, a large new study has found.
Researchers examined the coffee-drinking habits of 27,793 people who filled out diet questionnaires in a large national health study from 1999 to 2010. The scientists also tracked blood levels of four enzymes that indicate liver function. The study is online in Hepatology.
More than 14,000 of the subjects drank coffee. After controlling for age, sex, race, education, smoking, alcohol consumption and other factors, the researchers found that compared with people who drank no coffee, those who drank three cups a day were about 25 percent less likely to have abnormal liver enzyme levels. Among the more than 2,000 who drank only decaffeinated coffee, the results were similar.
The reason for the effect is unclear. “There are more than a thousand compounds in coffee,” said the lead author, Qian Xiao, a cancer prevention fellow at the National Cancer Institute. “There are a few candidates, but I don’t know which is responsible.”
Should those who do not drink coffee start doing so? “This is an observational study and not designed to determine cause and effect,” Dr. Xiao said. “So based on this study, I wouldn’t make any recommendations. But it is reassurance that coffee and decaf are not harmful to liver function.”