Every morning, there are some of us who hum the tune “Wake up in the morning…to get that coffee” and there are others, like me, who proudly say,  “Starbucks line-ups are not for me, as I don’t drink coffee.”

When it comes to coffee it seems to me that most people think coffee is bad for our health. As we know, there are various studies which suggest that coffee is unhealthy and can enhance the progression of diseases, such as cancer, blood pressure and cholesterol.

To our surprise, however, there have been recent studies which show that drinking coffee may have some benefits. Coffee drinkers will be interested in knowing that these studies prove that coffee is beneficial and can actually reduce the risk of many diseases such as: depression, Parkinson’s disease, type 2 diabetes, and dementia.

We all know that women’s lives can be greatly affected by depression. Being a woman, I decided to do a little research on depression and, while browsing, found a very interesting study.

In a recent Nurses’s Health study titled “Coffee, Caffeine, and Risk of Depression Among Women,” Dr. Michel Lucas and colleagues analyzed how consumption of coffee helps reduce the risk of depression among women. In the

Coffee consumption reduces the risk of depression!

experiment 50,739 women were followed from 1996 to 2006, and their caffeine consumption was measured using questionnaires which were completed from 1980 to 2004. The signs of clinical depression were measured by using the  Cox proportional hazards regression model. The results showed that the more coffee women drank, the less likely it was for them to develop clinical depression, however, no relationship between the decaffeinated coffee and depression was observed. Moreover, women who consumed four or more cups of coffee per day had lower depression risk than women who consumed one cup or less.

Another interesting fact was that the relationship between caffeine and depression was only seen in non-smoking women because caffeine is broken down faster in smokers. This suggests that caffeine is an important factor which plays a role in lowering the risk of depression.

The authors’ of this study explained, in the Archives of Internal Medicine, that “because of its observational design, this study can not prove that caffeine of caffeinated coffee reduces the risk of depression but only suggests the possibility of such protective effect.”

Although, this study suggests that caffeine is an important chemical which may protect women from depression, there still needs be a follow-up research done in order to explain how caffeine actually works to lower the risk of depression, why is it broken down faster in smokers and does caffeine from any caffeinated beverage lower depression risk?

Next time, before we call somebody out for drinking coffee, we should probably go through the coffee benefit check-list first!

References: Coffee, Caffeine, and Risk of Depression Among Women, Coffee may reduce depression risk