Drinking Coffee Every Day Lowers Risk of Death, According to Study

If you were thinking about cutting back on your daily coffee intake, you may want to reconsider.

According to a new study, people who drink coffee have a lower risk of death than non-coffee drinkers.

Researchers studied more than 170,000 people and found that those who drink 1.5 to 3.5 cups of coffee per day were significantly less likely to die during their 7-year study than non-coffee drinkers. The average age of participants was 56.

How people take their coffee also revealed some staggering statistics about mortality.

For example, folks who consumed sugar-sweetened coffee were between 29 and 31 percent less likely to die than non-coffee drinkers, while individuals who drank unsweetened coffee were between 16 and 21 percent less likely to die than those who declined java.

Dr. Christina Wee, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, could not confirm whether drinking coffee was directly responsible for the outcome since the causes of death were not cited in the study. Still, she does believe there are some big benefits behind our favorite brew.

"Biologically, it is plausible that coffee could actually confer some direct health benefits," Wee told NBC News. "We can't say for sure that it's the coffee drinking per se that leads to the lower mortality risk."

In an interview with the New York Times, Wee called the study's longevity percentages "huge."

"There are very few things that reduce your mortality by 30 percent," she explained.