Fans of their daily cup of joe are in luck. Not only is coffee good for your memory, helpful for fighting diseases such as diabetes, Parkinson’s, and cancer, but it also can help fight one of the negative effects of booze.
New research has found that drinking coffee daily can help lower your risk of liver damage from drinking alcohol. Liver cirrhosis is a disease that involves loss of liver cells and irreversible liver scarring, which causes one million deaths per year, according to the study. It is commonly caused by excessive alcohol.
Researchers from the University of Southampton looked at nine different studies with a total of 430,000 participants, and they found that daily consumption of coffee significantly reduced people’s risk of liver cirrhosis.
The more cups the participants drank, the lower their risk of contracting the disease. One cup of coffee a day reduces your risk of liver cirrhosis by 22 percent; two cups a day reduces reduces it by 44 percent. Kick it up a notch and drink three cups for a 57 percent reduction or drink four cups for 65 percent.
Although researchers found a significant connection between coffee consumption and lowered risk of the disease, they are not yet sure what it is about coffee that provides this benefit.
Other research has found that coffee drinkers tend to have better levels of liver enzymes than non-drinkers and that coffee can protect against liver cancer.
However, experts were also sure to note that coffee alone isn’t enough to undo total damage from excessive alcohol consumption, so don’t think that just because you load up on an iced coffee post-drinking you’re in the clear. However, for the meantime, it can’t hurt to enjoy some java to at least help protect against any potential damage.
It may not be such a bad idea to reach for that latte when you’ve got a “headache” after all.
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