Coffee might actually undo liver damage from booze
Finally some good news about your liver health: coffee could be improving it — even when it comes to the damage that comes from alcohol.
Think back to your middle school DARE class. Remember cirrhosis of the liver, the disease you can develop from drinking too much? It turns out coffee can reduce your risk for cirrhosis. And the risk reduction is pretty huge — it’s 44%.
From Business Insider:
Researchers analyzed data from nine previously published studies with a total of more than 430,000 participants and found that drinking two additional cups of coffee a day was linked to a 44% lower risk of developing liver cirrhosis.
In fact, the study found that the more coffee participants drank, the more their risk for cirrhosis decreased.
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Still, too much booze is bad for you. This new study shouldn’t give you carte blanche to black out every night and attempt to undo it with venti cold brews in the morning. And if you do up your coffee intake, make sure you’re also drinking a ton of water, since coffee is a diuretic and can dehydrate you, just like alcohol.
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Because as we should all know by now, there’s no substitute for a healthy lifestyle.
“Unfortunately, although coffee contains compounds that have antioxidant effects and anti-inflammatory properties, drinking a few cups of coffee a day cannot undo the systematic damage that is the result of being overweight or obese, sedentary, excessive alcohol consumption or drastically mitigate an unhealthy diet,” Samantha Heller, a senior clinical nutritionist at New York University Langone Medical Center in New York, told BI.
So yes, drink a ton of coffee — but don’t be a total dirtbag in every other aspect of your health. It’s that simple.
