Gloria Jean’s Coffees outlets are a common sight in cities across Southeast Asia. This one is in a central Yangon mall (Simon Roughneen)
DUBLIN — Coffee not only takes bleary out of bleary-eyed, according to British scientists, but lowers the likelihood of liver disease so long as it’s no more than three or four cups a day.
Researchers at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Southampton looked at health data for almost half a million people and concluded that “drinking any type of coffee was associated with a reduced risk of developing and dying from chronic liver disease compared to not drinking coffee.”
According to Oliver Kennedy, the lead author of the study, which was published by BioMedCentral, a Springer Nature journal, coffee “could offer a potential preventative treatment for chronic liver disease.”
The numbers suggest when it comes to maintaining a healthy liver, a cuppa joe is more like a cuppa jolt. Coffee drinkers had a roughly 20 per cent reduced risk of chronic liver disease or fatty liver disease and a 49 per cent reduced risk of death from chronic liver disease compared to their caffeine-coy counterparts.
Kennedy’s team warned, however, that the bean-based benefits peak “at three to four cups per day.”
The team looked at around a decade’s worth of patient data on people “with known coffee consumption” and compared it with data on others who do not drink coffee to see “who developed chronic liver disease and related liver conditions.”
The data is stored at Britain’s Biobank, which is described on its website as “a large-scale biomedical database and research resource containing in-depth genetic and health information from half a million UK participants.”
