At least, if you're female. And a nurse.
These conclusions come from data on 155,594 mostly white female nurses (average age 55) who took part in two long-running health studies. They were questioned periodically about their diets and health over 12 years. About 33,000 were diagnosed with high blood pressure. Women who drank more than three daily cups of coffee (regular or decaf) were about 7 percent to 12 percent less likely to develop high blood pressure than women who drank little or no coffee.
However. Those who drank at least four cans of sugared cola drinks daily were 28 percent to 44 percent more likely to develop high blood pressure than women who drank few or none. Diet sodas increased the risk, but slightly less.
Now, this is one of those "good news for coffee drinkers" studies that appears periodically. It's happened enough, over a long enough time, that I think we can conclude that coffee, in the main, is good for you.
Yet the reporters writing up these studies always seem curiously reluctant to come to that conclusion. Look at the 2nd and 3rd paragraphs of the PI article I reference:
But for some reason, women in the same study who drank colas did seem to have a greater risk of high blood pressure.
Researchers were surprised at that and cautioned that the study wasn't conclusive. Caffeine is in both beverages and has been shown to cause short-term increases in blood pressure. But coffee drinkers in the study were no more likely than abstainers to develop high blood pressure during 12 years of follow-up.
The headline is that coffee is "safe" -- but if you look at the actual data, it's more than that. Coffee isn't just safe, it's protective. You are LESS likely to develop high blood pressure, not the same likely. And note the "surprise" and "caution" advised when it reports that cola appears to be bad for you.
The second part of that surprised me a bit -- since I had always assumed that the media reluctance to talk about health benefits of coffee stemmed from a nannyish attitude that coffee was a "vice" and therefore couldn't possibly be good for you really, so this study, it must be, some kind of anomaly. But the reluctance to condemn colas -- which I would have thought were seen as a "vice" in much the same way as coffee -- makes me think maybe something else is going on here.
Maybe the mainstream media is completely in thrall to the Sugar Barons.
Or maybe it's just the Seattle PI, come to think of it, since if you type "Wolfgang Winkelmayer" (lead author of the study. That's his real name. Cool, huh?) and "coffee" into Google news and look for all related stories, some of the headlines are a little more aggressively pro-coffee.
So. Yay coffee. And now I'm off to drink some.
