Women, coffee&CHD - EFR 6-13

This article continues to show that answers are not easy. Our nutrition education efforts should help the public to understand that staying healthy has no one solution.

Excerpted from FOOD CHEMICAL NEWS February 19 1996 Page 13

In a study reported in the February 14, 1996 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Walter Willett and other Harvard researchers reported that coffee drinking in women was not an important cause of coronary heart disease (CHD). This 10-year follow-up study of more than 85,000 registered nurses, found no evidence of any positive association between coffee consumption of six or more cups a day and risk of heart disease in women.

"We specifically found no evidence of an effect of recent coffee consumption, coffee consumption before 1976, decaffeinated coffee, or total coffee intake," said the researchers. "The large sample size as well as the ability to control for a wide variety of risk factors and the high follow-up rate reduce the likelihood that chance, confounding, or bias could explain the observed null result.."

When the results were adjusted only for age, there was a positive association between the 712 documented cases of CHD and coffee. But when cigarette smoking was taken into account, the association between coffee and CHD was completely eliminated according to the researchers. The study even looked back to the mid-1970s when percolation was more widely used and still found no positive connnection between coffee drinking and CHD.

These results varied from findings in previous studies and the researchers stated that they could not explain the differences. One variation was suggested by the observation that studies in Norway and Greece involved the use of unfiltered coffee which appears to contain a substance that raises serum cholesterol. Unfiltered coffee is rarely consumed in the United States.