For thousands of years, coffee has been one of the two or three most popular beverages on earth. But it's only recently that scientists are figuring out that the drink has notable health benefits.

1. DRINKING COFFEE
HELPS LIVE LONGER
For thousands of years, coffee has
been one of the two or three most
popular beverages on earth. But it's
only recently that scientists are
figuring out that the drink has notable
health benefits. In one large-scale
epidemiological study from last year,
researchers primarily at the National
Cancer Institute parsed health
information from more than 4,00,000
volunteers, ages 50 to 71, who were
free of major diseases at the study's
start in 1995. By 2008, more than
50,000 of the participants had died.
But men who reported drinking two
or three cups of coffee a day were 10
per cent less likely to have died than
those who didn't drink coffee, while
women drinking the same amount
had 13 per cent less risk of dying
during the study. It's not clear exactly
what coffee had to do with their
longevity, but the correlation is
striking.
Other recent studies have linked
moderate coffee drinking — the
equivalent of three or four 150 ml
cups of coffee a day or a single venti-
size Starbucks — with more specific
advantages: a reduction in the risk of
developing Type 2 diabetes, basal cell
carcinoma (the most common skin
cancer), prostate cancer, oral cancer
and breast cancer recurrence.
COFFEE

2. In a 2012 study of humans, researchers
from the University of South Florida
and the University of Miami tested the
blood levels of caffeine in older adults
with mild cognitive impairment, or the
first glimmer of serious forgetfulness, a
common precursor of Alzheimer's
disease, and then re-evaluated them two
to four years later. Participants with
little or no caffeine circulating in their
bloodstreams were far more likely to
have progressed to full-blown
Alzheimer's than those whose blood
indicated they'd had about three cups'
worth of caffeine.
Perhaps most consequential, animal experiments show
that caffeine may reshape the biochemical environment
inside our brains in ways that could stave off dementia. In
a 2012 experiment at the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign, mice were briefly starved of oxygen, causing
them to lose the ability to form memories. Half of the
mice received a dose of caffeine that was the equivalent of
several cups of coffee. After they were re-oxygenated, the
caffeinated mice regained their ability to form new
memories 33 per cent faster than the uncaffeinated. Close
examination of the animals' brain tissue showed that the
caffeine disrupted the action of adenosine, a substance
inside cells that usually provides energy, but can become
destructive if it leaks out when the cells are injured or
under stress. The escaped adenosine can jump-start a
biochemical cascade leading to inflammation, which can
disrupt the function of neurons, and potentially contribute
to neurodegeneration or, in other words, dementia.
CAFFEINE