If you want to live longer, drink 8 or more cups of coffee a day.

As soon as you start thinking about the health benefits of coffee… it’s like getting caught up in a never-ending soap opera.

Once day we hear that coffee is good for your health. The next day someone is claiming it causes cancer.

But behind all the drama there is a growing body of evidence in support of many of the health claims for coffee.

You can find a whole list of some of the benefits of drinking coffee on our main “coffee and health” page.

But perhaps the most interesting claim is that coffee actually helps you live longer.

Wow… It’s an addictive habit that extends your life… and tastes good too!

Better still, it seems the more coffee you drink, the greater the benefit.

The National Cancer Institute, National Institutes of Health, and the Feinberg School of medicine at Northwestern University recently analyzed coffee-drinking data from the UK Biobank, a long-term study of half a million people in the U.K. aged 38 to 74.

And they found that if you really want to live longer, you should drink 8 or more cups of coffee a day.

That’s two full carafes a day… one for me and one for my wife!

And it’s not just that one study using data from the U.K. Other studies, based on data collected from the coffee-drinking habits of millions of Americans, are reaching similar conclusions.

Nobody is saying exactly why or how coffee is turning out to be such a wonder drug. They just know there’s a strong correlation between coffee consumption and a longer, healthier life.

And that’s pretty amazing when you think of how much pharmaceutical companies invest in trying to find drugs that will extend the human lifespan.

Life extension is a massive business.

Meanwhile, you and I can extend our lives at no extra cost… one cup of coffee at a time.