Go ahead and have that second cup of coffee. Or a third, if you can withstand the caffeine buzz. Drinking coffee is good for you and may lower the risk for prostate cancer.
We’ll stop right now and acknowledge that somewhere else in cyberspace, someone is posting quite the opposite. Coffee=Bad.
But we’re going to stick with science. A review posted in BMJ Open combined data from 16 different studies, calculating the risks associated with the highest versus the lowest coffee consumption (both caffeinated and decaffeinated).
Researchers determined that among the participants, the risk for advanced cancer was 12 percent lower, and their risk for fatal disease was 16 percent lower.
There were 1,081,586 male participants, including 57,732 cases of prostate cancer, in studies conducted in the United States, Europe and Japan. The research showed that, compared with people who drank the least amount of coffee, those who consumed the most had a 9 percent lower risk for prostate cancer.
Each additional daily cup of coffee amounted to almost a 1 percent decrease in cancer risk.
The highest amounts of coffee consumption ranged from two to nine or more cups a day. The lowest ranged from none to fewer than two cups a day.
The data was dependent on self-reports, which can be unreliable. Another disclaimer: the studies were observational and only show an association between coffee drinking and prostate cancer risk, not cause and effect.
The research team was led by urologist Dr. Kefeng Wang, of China Medical University in Shenyang.
“This study suggests that increased coffee consumption may be associated with a reduced risk of prostate cancer,” the study said. “Further research is still warranted to explore the underlying mechanisms and active compounds in coffee,” they added, but “if the association is further proved to be a causal effect, men might be encouraged to increase their coffee consumption to potentially decrease the risk of prostate cancer.”
