Anytime I see a new positive coffee study, and there seems to be that chance every few months, I feel less and less guilty about one of my few vices. Here’s an enlightening new study…
Coffee as Sunscreen? Well, Not Exactly
Not only will you be perked up and alert with your daily joe, but researchers now say it may also reduce your risk of developing skin cancer.
“Our study indicates that coffee consumption may be an important option to help prevent basal cell carcinoma,” said lead researcher Fengju Song, a postdoctoral fellow in the department of dermatology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston.
The more coffee that was consumed, the lower the risk of skin cancer. The same could not be said for decaffeinated coffee.
Looking pretty good, eh, fellow coffee slaves? There is a downside, in that the researchers were not able to prove a cause and effect. However, this was by no means a study done on a small scale. The team of researchers collected data on almost 113,000 adults, about 73,000 women and about 40,000 men and they did follow-up research over a 20-year period.
What they found was that women who drank more than three cups of coffee a day had a 20 percent lower risk of developing basal cell carcinoma compared with women who drank less than one cup in a month. With the men, the risk was nine percent lower for those who drank three cups of coffee every day, compared with those who drank less than one cup a month.
While this may seem like a license to indulge, Dr. Robert S. Kirsner, professor and vice chairman of dermatology and cutaneous surgery at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, says that people shouldn’t start up a coffee drinking habit just for this reason.
Also read:
Sunburn Protection From an Unlikely Source
(via: USA Today)