Coffee, and whether or not it’s good for you, has been a research focus for decades. A regular cup or two has been linked to better heart health, a longer life, and most recently, a study led by a Harvard researcher, Dr. Sara Mahdavi found that drinking coffee may even aid healthy aging in women.
“The findings suggest that caffeinated coffee—not tea or decaf—may uniquely support aging trajectories that preserve both mental and physical function,” said Mahdavi, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
The paper, which was presented at the American Society of Nutrition’s annual meeting, has not yet been published or peer-reviewed. But the findings are robust.
Researchers followed 47,513 women over the course of decades, starting in 1984, and analyzed their health data and coffee-drinking habits.
By 2016, only 3,706 participants were considered healthy agers. Factors that the researchers considered to define healthy aging were:
