A Massive New Harvard Study Says This Is What Happens to Women Who Drink Coffee Every Day

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They studied 47,513 women and their coffee-drinking habits over decades.

EXPERT OPINION BY BILL MURPHY JR., FOUNDER OF UNDERSTANDABLY AND CONTRIBUTING EDITOR, INC. @BILLMURPHYJRJun 15, 2025SHARELinkedInFacebookXBlueskyLink

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Another day, another coffee study — this one led by a Harvard researcher who analyzed data on 47,513 women and their coffee-drinking habits over decades, and found something remarkable about what happens to them as they age.

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Researchers determined that a little over 3,706 of the original group, whose coffee consumption was tracked beginning in 1984, were still alive in 2016, and were living lives that fit the researchers’ definition of “healthy aging.”

This included things like:

Being 70 years old or older
Self-reporting good mental and physical health
Having no reported memory problems or cognitive impairment
Being free of 11 chronic diseases — among them: “cancer, Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, kidney failure, Parkinson’s disease, and multiple sclerosis”

Now comes the really good news for anyone — but especially a woman — who drinks a lot of coffee.

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More coffee? More healthy aging

In short, the women in the study who habitually drank at least one cup of coffee a day were statistically much more likely to be among those 3,706 women who stayed strong, mentally sharp, and healthy as they grew older.

“While past studies have linked coffee to individual health outcomes, our study is the first to assess coffee’s impact across multiple domains of aging over three decades,” said presenting author Sara Mahdavi, a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health at Harvard University and an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto, Faculty of Medicine.

The findings were set to be presented earlier this month at Nutrition 2025, the annual conference of the American Society for Nutrition.

Coffee, not soda

The study was based on data from the Nurses’ Health Study, one of the largest longitudinal studies ever undertaken that investigated risk factors for major chronic diseases.

Beginning with married women who worked in the United States as registered nurses in the year 1976, the study initially was intended to track the long-term effects of oral contraceptives. Over time, the data collected was greatly expanded — and among many other things began to include coffee, tea, and soda intake.

Here, the researchers went back and correlated the caffeine and coffee habits that Nurses’ Health Study participants reported with whether they were among the 3,706 “healthy agers.” The results were remarkable:

First, the women’s likelihood of being in the “healthy agers” group went up by between 2 percent and 5 percent for every extra cup of coffee they drank a day on average, up to five small cups of coffee (eight ounces) per day.

Second, only caffeinated coffee mattered; drinking decaffeinated coffee or tea had no significant association with increasing the likelihood of healthy aging.

Finally, drinking soda — even soda with caffeine — was worse than drinking nothing at all in terms of the likelihood of healthy aging. In fact, for every 12-ounce soda the women reported drinking per day, their odds of being in the healthy agers cohort dropped by 20 percent to 26 percent.

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The researchers also controlled for other factors including age, BMI, whether the women smoked and drank alcohol, along with “physical activity, education, and dietary protein.”

“In addition to the large sample size and 30 years of follow-up, we assessed several different aspects of longevity and healthy aging as well as very comprehensive information on nutritional and lifestyle habits that were collected every four years after the initiation of the study,” Mahdavi said.

Not the first time

We should acknowledge loud and clear that this study just shows correlation, not causation. For example, it’s possible that women who drank lots of coffee also had some other factor in common that researchers didn’t identify, and that led to a higher likelihood of healthy aging.

That said, the new study takes its place as the latest in a long line of studies we’ve seen that suggest drinking coffee is related to some very powerful, positive health effects.

Among them:

A 2018 study of 500,000 people in JAMA Internal Medicine found an unmistakable across-the-board increase in longevity among people who drink lots of coffee.
A study last year on the coffee consumption habits of 40,725 Americans who were included in the 19-year-long U.S. National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey found that drinking coffee specifically in the morning was associated with a lower risk of death or cardiovascular disease.
A study of lifestyle, health, and biographical data published in 2022 relating to 171,616 people in Great Britain found that both men and women between the ages of 37 and 73 who drank between 1.5 and 3.5 cups of coffee each day had up to a 30 percent lower chance of dying from any cause during the seven-year study period than those who did not.
A 2023 study in the Journal of the American Medical Directors Association followed the coffee habits of 12,583 participants over 20 years and determined that those who drank copious amounts of coffee were twice as likely to avoid becoming physically frail as they aged into their 70s.
Maybe most intriguingly, a study of 347,077 coffee drinkers out of the University of South Australia in 2019 found that health benefits increase the more coffee people drink — but only up to five cups per day. Beyond that, the Australian researchers found, the risk of heart disease actually starts to increase.

Bottom line? Bottoms up

Ironically, and without even thinking about it, I realize that as I’ve sat here writing this article, I’ve drained a small cup of black coffee, refilled it, and drank about half the second cup.

All of which makes me appreciate these kinds of studies even more.

Isn’t it great to come across scientific studies that help justify some of the things we’re already doing?

Maybe you’ll join me in raising a glass to that. Or more to the point, a cup.

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