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Is Coffee the Solution to Everything from Cancer to Female Sex Drive?
Women at high risk of breast cancer before reaching age 70 reduced this pending danger by 80 percent by drinking six or more cups of coffee a day, says a new study - just one of several recent reports claiming health benefits of coffee. Health conscious senior citizens, always seeking the latest miracle drug, may find they have been taking it all along. (All the coffee news is not good - see report below this story.)
The health benefits of coffee just keep pouring in. Besides the new cancer study linking higher coffee consumption to lower percentage of women who develop breast cancer, recent studies have suggested that -
● those who drink more than three cups of coffee daily are less likely to develop high blood pressure,
● coffee drinkers are less likely to develop liver cancer,
● coffee is the number one source of healthy antioxidants in the American diet,
● coffee reduces development of type 2 diabetes,
● coffee prevents Parkinson's disease,
● coffee contributes to better short-term memory and
● last but not least, that coffee may increase sex drive in women.
The latest coffee study on breast cancer was conducted by Steven Narod of the University of Toronto. The study, published in the International Journal of Cancer in January, studied women with a very specific gene mutation known as BRCA1.
Those women have an 80 percent risk of developing breast cancer before their 70th birthday. But according to Narod, those involved in his study, "... who drank six or more cups of coffee a day on average had about a 75 percent reduction in the risk of developing breast cancer."
Getting bigger headlines, however, is a recent study of sexual behavior in rats suggests that coffee serves as the equivalent of female Viagra.
In the study, female rats that got their first shot of caffeine before mating were quicker than uncaffeinated females to scurry back to a male rat after sex.
The caffeinated females weren't just looking for company. "It looks as if they wanted to have sex again," researcher Fay Guarraci, PhD, told WebMD. (Read full report)
That study was tentative at best, and looked only at rats which were not habitual coffee drinkers. So women who consume coffee rarely may find coffee to be a sexual stimulant.
But other health studies link coffee consumption to solid evidence that high levels of antioxidants in coffee carry health benefits and may reduce the risk of several cancers. A separate cancer study shows coffee drinkers are less likely to develop cancer of the liver as consumption levels increase.
A paper presented last year at the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) in Chicago linked coffee drinking with better short-term memory. Florian Koppelstatter, M.D., Ph.D., said, "We were able to show that caffeine modulates a higher brain function through its effects on distinct areas of the brain." Koppelstatter is a radiology fellow at the Medical University-Innsbruck in Austria.
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