The health benefits of coffee are myriad. They’ve been parsed out by scientists in about as many ways as there are parts of the human anatomy. Three cups a day to help with the cartilage in your left knee. Four cups for your cochlea. You name it. But what’s the actual impact? What does it all come to? Nearly two extra years of life, it turns out. A new meta-study finds that regular coffee consumption is linked with an increased life expectancy by 1.8 years, and good years at that.
As reported by Newsweek, the study is the work of researchers from Portugal’s Center for Neuroscience and Cell Biology (CNC) was published recently in the journal Ageing Research Reviews. For it, the researchers examined more than 50 studies on coffee’s effect on health, representing individuals across Europe, North America, and Asia.
They found that, based on the examined studies, regular coffee consumption was associated with an additional 1.8 years of life. They also note that the “maximal benefits afforded by 3 cups a day,” with the effects starting to wane with more or fewer regular cups.
And these aren’t end of life years getting tacked on, either. When diving deeper into coffee’s effect on the Seven Pillars of Aging—epigenetics, inflammation, macromolecular damage, metabolism, proteostasis, stem cell regeneration, and stress—the meta-study found coffee consumption to be beneficial and having “a consistent association between coffee intake and living longer, as well as healthier aging.”
Based on the average American life expectancy in 2024, 1.8 additional years increases the overall lifespan by 2.27%, which is a non-trivial amount. Especially for doing something you were planning on doing anyway (and would probably still do if it pushed your total number of years on this mortal coil in the other direction). Pretty good. Pretty pretty pretty good.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
