Four Cups of Coffee A Day Cuts Risk of Oral Cancer

An anonymous reader writes "Coffee may help lower the risk of developing oral and pharyngeal cancer and of dying from the disease. The study, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, was conducted using the Cancer Prevention Study II. The large cohort study began in 1982 by the American Cancer Society. Researchers were able to examine 968,432 men and women, none of whom had cancer at the time of their enrollment in the study." Four or more cups a day lowered the risk of getting oral cancers by a whopping 49%.

That's great...

[UltraZelda64]

...but what does it increase the chances of? Well, besides drug (caffeine) addiction?

Come on, there's always a catch...

You Sure?

[okmijnuhb]

You sure it doesn't mean that those with the physical constitution to withstand 4 cups of coffee are resistant to oral cancers?
These studies are meaningless.

Sunrise

[EmagGeek]

Every day, about 310,000,000 Americans do not get cancer of any kind.

The Sun also rises every day.

Therefore, we can conclude with 95% confidence that Sunrise prevents cancer.

AARP had this first...

[Zibodiz]

Okay, not to be a wet blanket, but my Dad told me about this a week ago, after reading about it in his subscription of AARP's [print] magazine. Shouldn't us young[er], technologically-savvy, electronically-delivered folks be getting science news a little bit faster than the old people get it in their mainstream print magazines?

Re:Possible FRAUD ALERT.

[mcgrew]

I'm VERY skeptical.

Seriously? Did you not RTFS? "The study, published in the American Journal of Epidemiology, was conducted using the Cancer Prevention Study II. The large cohort study began in 1982 by the American Cancer Society. Researchers were able to examine 968,432 men and women, none of whom had cancer at the time of their enrollment in the study."

What is someone who doesn't trust science fucking doing at slashdot, anyway? Go back to Sports Illustrated and leave us nerds alone, dumbass.

Correlationn is not causation

[davidannis]

One study found that you are less likely to die young if you drink wine instead of beer. It's not because beer causes death or because wine wards death off. It is because at the time the study was done the ratio of wine to beer consumption was strongly correlated with income. Having a higher income was positively correlated with adequate nutrition and health care. Just because drinking coffee correlates with something doesn't mean that it causes it.

Re:It's the antioxidants

[Andrio]

Back in the 1800s, scientists discovered the three macronutrients: carbs, protein, and fat. They said to themselves "We now understand food. If people get enough of all these three, they will be healthy."

Of course, that didn't work. People still got things like scurvy.

Then scientists discovered Vitamins. And they said "We now understand food. If people get enough of all of these, they'll be healthy."

Of course, that doesn't seem to be really working either. Even processed and refined food is often loaded with vitamins (100% Vitamin C!) because it's marketable.

Now recently scientists started to pay attention to these things called Polyphenols. There's thousands of different ones, found in food (well, natural foods); they're what "antioxidants" can be classified as. Not all that much is known about them so far (It doesn't pay much to do research in non-patentable stuff, like natural food). But I suspect they will eventually they'll become as common in dietery speak as the macro and micro nutrients are.

In short, food, and foods effects on the body are a very complex thing, and only fools believe we know all there is to be know about it.