Coffee May Keep a Particular Cancer at Bay

We already know that coffee may be able to help mitigate couch-potato lifestyles, boost longevity, and reduce your risk for a slew of conditions, including diabetes and heart disease. Add two more to that latter list, according to research published in the journal Cancer: Scientists have found that drinking four-plus cups of coffee per day has been tied to a lower risk of head and neck cancer—especially oral and oropharyngeal cancers—than for individuals who don't drink joe. Head and neck cancer is the seventh most common form, with nearly a million cases and 400,000 deaths annually around the globe, per the Washington Post.

For their research, the scientists reviewed 14 studies that featured more than 9,500 patients with head and neck cancer, as well as nearly 16,000 control subjects. Meanwhile, drinking tea daily, even just one cup, was also linked to a lower risk of head and neck cancer than those who don't indulge. Drinking more than one cup of tea, however, was tied to a higher risk of laryngeal cancer.

Scientists don't think it's necessarily the caffeine in the coffee that's conferring the benefits they found, as even a daily cup of decaf coffee was found to lower the risk of oral cavity cancer. Their hypothesis? That antioxidants like the polyphenols found in coffee may be doing the trick. Limitations of the study include that most of the subjects were white males, per Medical News Today, meaning there's not a lot of evidence on how coffee and tea drinking would affect other demographics.

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The researchers also relied on self-reporting from the subjects, which could have introduced recall bias on just how much coffee or tea they drink. Still, all of this is not to say that everyone should start guzzling down gallons of java every morning. "Those sensitive to caffeine will likely have difficulty drinking this much coffee to experience the effect," Medical News Today quotes one expert as saying. "At the end of the day, this study shows we can still enjoy our coffee in the morning, but we do not have to try and drink more than usual to protect from head and neck cancer." (More coffee stories.)