Coffee could help protect people from cancer, global health chiefs will announce today. The World Health Organisation (WHO) will say there is evidence that drinking coffee regularly may prevent certain types of the disease, such as womb and liver cancer.


Experts are said to have found an ‘inverse relationship’ between coffee consumption and those types of cancer.

In a shock ruling, the cancer-research wing of the WHO will also reverse its previous finding about the dangers of drinking coffee.

In 1991, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) decreed coffee ‘possibly caused cancer’, but after reviewing academic and scientific research carried out over the last two decades, the WHO will today announce that it is revoking its previous conclusion that the drink could cause bladder cancer.

Instead coffee will be reclassified in WHO rankings, meaning there is insufficient evidence to say it might even possibly cause cancer.

It will move from Group 2B – in which substances are classified as ‘possibly carcinogenic to humans’ – into Group 3, for substances where there is no evidence of a link to cancer.

The ruling is likely to be a huge boon to Britain’s multi-billion pound coffee industry.

Coffee is drunk by 75 per cent of Britons, and it is also the most popular drink worldwide with around two billion cups consumed every day.

The rulings, revealed to the Daily Mail, come after experts from around the world met in France last month to re-evaluate the health risks of coffee.

They follow other recent research pointing to the health benefits of drinking coffee.
Source: Daily Mail