Two articles in today’s news talk about the benefits of caffeine in promoting long life, and in ensuring road safety.
The first study documents how the people from Ikaria, an island in Greece, have unusually long life expectancies, and researchers think the cause may be the boiled coffee they drink.
The islanders also eat a Mediterranean diet (see our report a couple of weeks ago,) but people there also sleep over 8 hours a night on average, and lead relatively stress free lives.
But researcher Dr. Gerasimos Siasos and his colleague Dr. Christodoulus Stefanadis at the University of Athens Medical School found that older islanders who drank the local form of boiled coffee had better functioning endothelium’s, the cells that line blood vessels.
The second study, published in BMJ.com looked at the consumption of caffeine by truck drivers and found on average that those who drank coffee were significantly less likely to have accidents than their peers who didn’t drink caffeinated drinks.
The lead author Lisa N. Sherwood at the George Institute for Global Health in Sydney, Australia, said that drinking caffeine-laden drinks meant drivers were 63 percent less likely to have a crash, but that fatigue and health management should not be neglected.
