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Drinking a lot of coffee causes cancer. Is this true?

Amir

... Coffee causes cancer; it's a common myth that drinking coffee might cause breast, pancreatic or other cancers.

A study from several years ago implied that drinking coffee increased the risk of pancreatic cancer. Dr. Brian McMahon, a professor of epidemiology at Harvard published a study called Coffee and Cancer of the Pancreas in the New England Journal of Medicine. Dr. McMahon opined that drinking even three cups of coffee a day increased the risk of pancreatic cancer threefold, and that coffee may have caused nearly half the pancreatic cancers in the United States.

In 1995 the Italian Pancreatic Cancer Study Group concluded the association between coffee use and pancreatic cancer still held after controlling for potential confounding factors such as cigarette smoking or alcohol use, and when the analysis was restricted to nonsmoking coffee drinkers.

Recent headlines claims that drinking coffee can reduce our risk of liver cancer.

Latter a team of Japanese researchers made new study of over 90.000 middle-aged men and woman, over a 10-year period! They found that people who drank coffee daily or nearly every day had half the liver cancer risk of those who never drank coffee. The study was published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

The study found that those who drank one or two cups of coffee every day halved their risk of this type of cancer. This risk decreased slightly more if they drank three or four cups every day, while those who drank five or more cups a day, saw the risk fall by 76%!

Why did earlier study result in inaccurate and misleading results? I think the example demonstrates that one study can't be conclusive, and science is a process of exploration. If there exists a large, consistent body of evidence, there can be established credible association between as an example coffee and disease, else not.

If you ask the coffee industry, they maintain that other studies shows that coffee is beneficial to your health, lowering the risk of colon cancer, gallstones and cirrhosis of the liver. They also claims that coffee contains more anti-oxidants than green tea, and is an excellent antidepressant.

I wonder what coffee industry think of cappuccino?... lol

Anywayzzz... I can drink my coffee, especially when sacrificing lots of my precious time where I am suppose to be in bed instead of staying up late at my desk staring at my laptop LCD, without having a bad conscience!

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Comments

Naee:

But I'm addicted to it... I guess I have to do something about my addiction...

(at March 18, 2005 12:40 PM)

West Ender:

Probably you'll find the same sort of results for many other substances; I mean good and bad side effects. Take Aspirin, it has a lot of known good and harmful effects. The same for Alcohol etc.

Also, the second research tells us that coffee is good in reducing the chances of liver cancer, and does not look into other possible negative effects of coffee. it also doesn't say if coffee is the *only* substance that reduces the chance of liver cancer.

Keep the balance and enjoy your coffee :-)

(at March 19, 2005 12:50 AM)

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Entry Date:

March 16, 2005
10:10 PM (GMT)

Category:

Science and Technology
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