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MONDAY, April 24 (HealthDay News) -- If you're reading this over your morning cup of coffee, you can sip away with the comforting thought that a new study found no relationship between drinking lots of the brew and coronary heart disease.
Data on more than 120,000 participants in two U.S. studies that followed people for as long as two decades found no link between heart disease and a daily intake of six or more cups of coffee. In fact, the risk was the same as for people who had less than one cup of coffee or tea a month.
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A couple of caveats go with the overall findings, the researchers said.
"We can't exclude the association between coffee consumption and the risk of coronary heart disease in small groups of people," said Rob van Dam, a research scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health, and a co-author of the report.
For instance, a recent study suggested that one form of a gene responsible for metabolism of caffeine could make coffee harmful to people who carry the gene, van Dam said, "although that finding requires confirmation."
And the new findings don't apply to heavy consumption of unfiltered coffee, such as the French press kind, he said. "Studies have consistently shown that drinking a lot of French press coffee increases low-density lipoprotein, the bad cholesterol," van Dam said.
The new findings appear in the April 25 issue of the journal Circulation.
What you put into your coffee cup other than coffee also matters, said Alice Lichtenstein, professor of nutritional science and policy at Tufts University, and chairwoman of the American Heart Association's nutrition committee.
"Just because there is no association between coffee and cardiovascular disease, that doesn't give free rein to order whatever you want at a coffee shop," she said. "The saturated fat in cream or whole milk and the sugar that is put in warrant consideration. Having black coffee or no-fat milk is one thing. It's another thing to drink coffee with lots of calories in it."
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