More good news for coffee drinkers from a study of sitting and sipping

Sedentary coffee drinkers had a 24% reduced risk of mortality compared with those who sat for more than six hours and didn’t drink coffee, according to the lead author of a study published recently in the journal BMC Public Health.

The finding, which was not part of the original article, was calculated at the Washington Post’s request and provided by Huimin Zhou, a researcher at the Medical College of Soochow University’s School of Public Health in China and the lead author of the study on coffee and health.

In the article, researchers reported that non-coffee drinkers who sat six hours or more per day were 58% more likely to die of all causes than coffee drinkers sitting for less than six hours a day, indicating both the risk of sedentary behavior and the benefit of coffee drinking. In his analysis for the Post, Zhou wrote that the comparison was chosen because it involved two “riskiest” behaviors with two least “risky” behaviors.

The study used data from 10,639 subjects, collected from 2007 to 2018 in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) by the National Center for Health Statistics. The NHANES survey, used to measure Americans’ health and nutrition status, has been collected every two years since 1999.

The researchers, primarily from the Medical College of Soochow University in Suzhou, China, also found that sitting more than eight hours a day was associated with a 46% higher risk of all-cause mortality and 79% higher risk of cardiovascular disease mortality, when compared with those sitting for less than four hours a day.

Additionally, those who drank the most coffee (more than two cups per day) showed a 33% reduced risk of all-cause mortality and 54% reduced risk of cardiovascular disease mortality compared with non-coffee drinkers.

In their conclusion, the researchers note that “given that coffee is a complex compound, further research is needed to explore this miracle compound.”