5 Cups a Day keeps Cancer away?

If recent research is anything to go by, drinking 8 cups of water and 5 cups of coffee could very well be just what the doctor orders. According to research done at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, women who drink five or more cups of coffee a day halve their chances of getting breast cancer. The study was done on 6,000 post-menopausal women and to the researchers’ surprise they found that coffee seemed to have an effect on the oestrogen-receptor negative breast cancer. This type of cancer is aggressive and doesn’t usually respond to drugs. Treatment requires extensive chemotherapy.

Professor Per Hall said “… the result was clear, when we looked more closely the more aggressive form of cancer was reduced by over half, meaning half as many women who drank lots of coffee were diagnosed with this cancer. We just don’t know what might be behind this association. There are so many different compounds in coffee that it could be any one of them that could be having an effect.” He was quick to add though that the type of coffee was not recorded, so they are still not entirely sure where the benefits are coming from. Before you start gulping down the cups though, you should know that Hall advised women to wait for the research to be confirmed as too much coffee can have side effects.

Yinka Ebo of of Cancer Research UK, also weighed on the research saying “this study does not provide firm evidence that drinking lots of coffee can help reduce the risk of breast cancer as it relied on people with cancer remembering how much coffee they drank years ago.” However he was quick to point out that evidence shows that women who drink little or no alcohol, exercise regularly and maintain a healthy weight after menopause are at a lower risk of breast cancer.

Who knew that your favourite drink could actually be saving you from your worst enemy? Till then… exercise and drink responsibly!

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-13352074