Can Coffee Make You Live Longer?

For many a daily coffee is their boost to get through the day, but that medium drip just might save your life.

People may preach about the dangers of caffeine, but a new study by the New England Journal of Medicine found that drinking coffee could have health benefits.

The study, which began in 1995, took a sampling of 400,000 volunteers ages 50-71 that had no major diseases at the start of the study. By 2008, 50,000 of the participants had passed away. However, research found that those men who reported drinking two or three cups of coffee per day were 10 percent less likely to have died than those who didn't drink coffee and women drinking the same amount were 13 percent less likely to have passed away, according to The New York Times.

Besides possibly living longer, caffeine may be able to help prevent Alzheimer's. A 2012 study by the University of South Florida tested the caffeine levels of people who had begun to show the beginning signs of Alzheimer's. The researchers then re-tested the same people two tofour years later. Participants with little or no caffeine in their bloodstreams were far more likely to have progressed to have developed Alzheimer's than those whose blood work had shown that they'd consumed about three cups' worth of caffeine.

These new results are no surprise, as other recent studies have also shown that caffeine can reduce the effects or prevent Type 2 diabetes, basal cell carcinoma, prostate cancer, oral cancer and breast cancer. But Dr. Gregory G. Freund, a professor of pathology at the University of Illinois, told The New York Times it is too early to tell the true effect of coffee on health.

"We don't know whether [coffee] is sufficient to prevent or lessen the effects of dementia," he said. "But, [coffee] has been popular for a long, long time, and there's probably good reasons for that."