Coffee May Curb Liver Cancer | CAOH Health and Nutrition Blog

Liver Cancer Appears to Be Rarer in Coffee Drinkers Than in People Who Don’t Drink Coffee

Aug. 2, 2007 — Could a cup of coffee cut your risk of developing liver cancer? It just might, but as always we’ll wait for what the next study says.

A new report, published in the August edition of the journal Hepatology, combines the results from 10 studies on coffee and liver cancer.

Together, the studies included 2,260 people with liver cancer and nearly 240,000 people without liver cancer. Participants lived in Greece, Italy, or Japan.

Participants reported their coffee-drinking habits. The data show that overall coffee drinkers were 41% less likely to have been diagnosed with liver cancer than people who don’t drink coffee.

For every daily cup of coffee people drank, their odds of having been diagnosed with liver cancer dropped by 23%, compared with people who never drink coffee.

People who drank a lot of coffee were 55% less likely to have been diagnosed with liver cancer than those who didn’t drink any coffee.

Ranges for high coffee consumption were from as little as one cup to more than three cups daily.

The fact that liver cancer was rarer among coffee drinkers a world apart — in Greece, Italy, and Japan — suggests that the coffee findings weren’t a fluke or a local phenomenon. The theory is that coffee perks up liver enzymes and may cut cirrhosis and liver cancer.

Whether or not coffee prevents liver cancer will remains open to discussion, as the next study may point to an opposite finding.

My Personal Thoughts: It seams that positive and negative studied about coffee have been written for decades. Personally I feel coffee is a wonderful beverage and posses little if any deleterious effects. Caffeine is the only substance in coffee with the potential of producing negative symptoms and it’s usually from abuse or long term consumption. My recommendation is if you are sensitive to caffeine, suffer from insomnia, or experience uncontrolled hypertension, stay away from caffeine.

Marcus Ettinger DC, BSc.