A cup of coffee a day can prevent oral cancer

Drinking a few cups of coffee a day could protect against oral and throat cancer, Japanese researchers say.

Japanese people consume a lot of coffee every year, and the number of esophageal cancer patients in men is also high. To find out whether coffee has a protective effect, Dr Hiroshi Naganuma of Tohoku University in Japan and his colleagues analysed data on coffee consumption and other dietary factors provided by the Japanese journal Body and Mind Research. Of the 38000 people aged 40 to 64 who had no history of cancer, 157 developed oral, throat and esophageal cancer in the following 13 years. Those who drank one or more cups of coffee a day had half the risk of developing these cancers compared with non-coffee drinkers.

Dr. Naganuma said that coffee's preventive effect, especially on people at high risk of cancer such as smokers and drinkers, was something they didn't think of, which was fundamentally different from their previous belief that coffee caused cancer. Although quitting smoking and alcohol is the best-selling idea for preventing these cancers, coffee's preventive effects are equally effective in low-and high-risk groups and should not be ignored, he said.