Well, after a lot of back and forth about whether drinking coffee is beneficial or detrimental to your health, it seems somewhat of a verdict has been reached – for now at least, that coffee does have some sort of unpinned health benefit.  New research shows that women who drink coffee have statistically lower rates of heart disease than non coffee drinkers, and also have a slightly longer span of life (I’m not sure how reliable that data could be though). 

This goes for whether you are a regular coffee drinker or whether you like decaffeinated, so it appears the health benefits are derived from the coffee itself rather than from the caffeine that it has in it, in fact, drinking decaf yields even more health benefits.  To me, this suggests that the reason coffee benefits those who drink it is because of its antioxidant capacity. 

Coffee is notoriously a good source of antioxidants, and it may be even better if you drink the organic stuff since the antioxidant nutrients are less “touched” by pesticides and other environmental pollutants.

While drinking coffee may be a health benefit, it probably still isn’t the healthiest, most antioxidant rich hot drink there is to wake you up.  Instead, consider trying yerba mate, or green tea as a good kick start to your morning, or maybe even white tea, which supposedly has also been found to be a vast cornucopia of anitoxidants. 

For me personally, I wish I could drink coffee, but for me, it makes me break out if I drink it too much. I also have to watch drinking highly caffeinated coffee like Starbucks since it contains higher amounts of caffeine, since this will break out my skin in two shakes of a lamb’s tail as they say.  A weaker brew or more watered down coffee might be in order for those that share my caffeine sensitivity.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 at 9:19 pm and is filed under Alternative & Herbal Health News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.