By Emily Murray

For those who love their morning eye-opening cup of coffee (or 3 or 4), new health news will come as a welcome surprise. Those who drink an average of 4 to 5 cups of coffee daily have a decreased risk of death.

It seems every few months or so, a new study reveals further health benefits of coffee and this  one will have java junkies jumping with joy.

In order to document the impact of coffee on overall health, researchers tracked over 400,000 coffee drinking adults for 14 years, making it the largest analysis conducted on mortality and coffee. In fact, men who had at least 6 cups a day actually decreased their risk of death by 10% over their non-coffee drinking peers. For women, that percentage was even greater at 15%. These results were recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

While most studies relating coffee to health have yielded positive findings, there was a study not too long ago that raised some concern about a possible link between coffee drinking and heart disease. However, what many researchers discovered is that a surprisingly high number of coffee drinkers were also cigarette smokers. This factor could greatly skew the results, casting coffee in an unfavorable light unnecessarily.

The interesting part about all this research is that no one can really answer the question “why?”. We see clear evidence that coffee can influence health positively, but we don’t know what that is for sure.