The brown mug of caffeine, ground from beans, has overtaken tea to become the nation's favourite. As well as the morning energy hit, there's more to this brown drink than meets the discerning eye.

Coffee has surged ahead in recent years to become Britain’s favourite hot drink. On almost every corner of every street, in every town, there is now someone who, with varying degrees of talent, will serve you a cappuccino, an espresso or macchiato. Although the coffee itself may taste like it belongs down a drain rather than being drained, coffee nevertheless has some health benefits. This has been known for some time, but the degree of those benefits has been a contentious subject.

Some studies say it increases a person’s risk of cancer. Other studies say it reduces your risk of cancer.

Sometimes it can often feel like a whirlwind of information when you’ve got one side saying your risk of stroke will go down, but your risk of cancer will go up.

What the world needs is a study on whether coffee, despite its risks or benefits, will help a person to live longer, to stretch their proverbial rubber band into the future.

Enter the universities Queen Mary of London and Semmelweis University.

Their study of people from the UK’s Biobank has found that those who drink up to three cups of ground coffee a day were 12 percent less likely to die.

Furthermore, these same people had a 17 percent lower risk of dying of heart disease and were 21 percent less likely to die of stroke.

During the course of the study it was also found that decaffeinated coffee had a number of health benefits.

Decaffeinated coffee drinkers were found to have a lower risk of death in comparison to those who didn’t drink coffee at all.

The reason for this was because the scientists discovered that not all of the health benefits from coffee come from the caffeine, but from antioxidants and other chemicals.

Some differences in the ways some coffees performed was found to be down to their preparation processes depending on the type of coffee.

There was a limit to coffee’s benefits however, and this was defined by the amount.

People who drank more than three cups a day had reduced positive outcomes.

More than three cups a day was linked to an increased risk of mortality overall compared to non-coffee drinkers.

Dr Pal Maurovich-Horvat said that they were able to use MRI scanning “to analyse the effect of regular coffee intake on the structure and function of the heart”.

Dr Maurovich-Horvat added: “We found that regular, light to moderate coffee consumption… can slow down age-related cardiac changes”.

Published in the Journal of Preventative Cardiology, this study adds further weight to the argument that, depending on the type and frequency of consumption, that coffee is a beneficial drink.

However, that’s all down to preference and drinking or not drinking coffee isn’t a matter of years, but percentages in this study, and even though it’s now in the silver medal position, tea still has some health benefits.

Tea still contains a lot of antioxidants that can reduce a person’s risk of heart disease for example.

Overall, tea is good for heart health and can reduce a person’s risk an attack or stroke.

Nevertheless, as the nation enters the final throes of winter and looks forward to spring, coffee remains ahead in the polls.

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