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Coffee is a part of the daily lives of hundreds of thousands of people around the globe. Most coffee-drinkers drink it for pleasure or for the caffeine, or both.
But did you know that coffee also contains many health benefits? Now,a new study from China, published in BMC Public Health, indicates that drinking coffee may mitigate some of the harmful effects of a sedentary life.
Sedentary lifestyles are bad for your health
According to MedicalNewsToday, living a sedentary lifestyle, which for the purposes of the study, was sitting for more than six hours a day, can be seriously detrimental to good health. It has been linked to an increased risk of death both from all-cause and heart-disease related death.
“Sedentary behavior is a crucial and independent predictor of inflammation, as it induces proinflammatory markers while reducing anti-inflammatory markers. Additionally, previous studies had shown that sedentary behavior alters the metabolism of skeletal muscle, and for each [additional] hour spent sitting or lying in a prone position during waking hours, metabolic risks increased by 39 percent,” Dr. Bingyan Li, professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Hygiene in the School of Public Health at the Medical College of Soochow University in Suzhou, China, told MedicalNewsToday.
However, there is hope on the horizon for people who can’t seem to get themselves up and moving. Euro News reports that the study, which followed over ten thousand people from the United States for over 10 years, showed that those who drank the most coffee had decreased rates of overall mortality.
Why Coffee?
But why coffee? Why did the researchers choose to focus on this drink in particular? Well, this is not the first time coffee has been connected to health benefits. In 2022, research from the UK Biobank showed that people who drank two to three cups of coffee a day had a 10 to fifteen percent lower risk of heart disease and heart failure. One of the prominent hypotheses for the reason why coffee helps prevent heart disease is the high level of polyphenols, a natural compound with high antioxidant properties found in coffee.
Still, as MedicalNewsToday points out, it is important to remember that the study published in BMC Public Health is an associative study. This means that the only thing it has proven is that there is an association between coffee and the mitigation of the health risks related to a sedentary lifestyle. And as is well known, correlation does not equal causation.
Whatever the case, one thing that the study does emphasize is the detrimental effects of a sedentary lifestyle. Even exercise may not diminish the effects of sitting all day. It is vitally important, especially in this day and age when most work is done sitting down in front of a screen, to get up and move around over the course of the day.
So those people who enjoy a cup of coffee in the morning and with an afternoon snack can take comfort in the fact that their little daily pleasure may also help them live longer and healthier.
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