My guess is that if you're drinking 6 cups of coffee a day, you've probably got yourself a nice white collar job - and a lot of the other life lengthening perks that come along with gainful employment.
Gosh I hope this doesn't come off as too negative, but what is the point finding these 'links'?<p>Science is about trying to explain the world, not looking for random facts.<p>We learn nothing of substance about coffee, health or anything else from this article. Yet it has the appearance of being scientific, for example, it mentions antioxidants.<p>It wouldn't be fair to label it <i>pseudoscience</i> however it does share some of the features.<p>People are starting to learn by now that correlation doesn't imply causation, but they still think it is suggestive of causation, or makes causation more probable, or something like that.<p>To try to dispel that: the fact that coffee drinking correlates positively with life expectancy is logically consistent with coffee acting to <i>reduce</i> lifespan. More importantly, knowing causes is not very helpful since pretty much everything causes pretty much everything else.<p>What is useful is solving problems and trying to explain the world. That's what people like Newton, Darwin and Einstein were doing.<p>FWIW my guess is that drinking coffee causes people to eat less food which might indeed result in greater health, though this doesn't seem like a fruitful line of enquiry.
NPR article on the same study, with link to the study itself, <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/05/16/152835058/can-coffee-help-you-live-longer-we-really-want-to-know" rel="nofollow">http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2012/05/16/152835058/can-co...</a>
I have a slow caffeine metabolism (SNP: rs762551) and according to some studies this may lead to me to develop heart disease if I drink too much caffeine.<p>The fact that I'm a minority and that fast metabolizers might actually benefit from caffeine says to me that going just on that article might not be a good idea.<p>A majority of people might benefit from caffeine, while a minority might have really dire consequences.<p>/edit this is all preliminary research so add more weight to "might" that I use here.
Tangential: I was actually pretty surprised at how good this article was at not being too hype-filled. It discussed the report in terms that did not imply causation. It offered potential explanations (with caveats that they were just speculation), pointed out potential flaws with the stats (2 different places where unaccounted factors may be the real responsibility), and generally didn't say "go drink lots of coffee, it will save your life".<p>So my kudos to the author and editor for being reasonable.
"The spice extends life. The spice expands consciousness..."<p>Given my dependence on coffee I'm probably going to end up floating in a tank of the stuff a few thousand years from now.