Washington: Coffee lovers, your coffee addiction may be balancing your booze habit as a new study has found that drinking your morning and afternoon java may actually help reverse the effects of alcohol.
The analysis of previous studies found drinking coffee could diminish the liklihood of developing liver cirrhosis, a disease which kills thousands of people in the UK every year and more than a million people worldwide.
The nine studies involved a total of 430,000 participants of which 1,990 had cirrhosis. Eight of the studies found the more coffee a person drank, the lower their risk in developing the disease.
Risk was reduced by 22 per cent with one cup of coffee, 43 per cent with two cups, 57 per cent with three cups and 65 per cent with four cups, compared to drinking no coffee at all.
Therapeutics, found stronger links between filter coffee and reduced cirrhosis risk than with boiled coffee, but the reason is not clear.
Southampton University's Oliver Kennedy said that coffee is a complex mixture containing hundreds of chemical compounds and it is unknown which of these is responsible for protecting the liver.
Samantha Heller, a senior clinical nutritionist at New York University Langone Medical Center, said that 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.
The findings are published in the journal Alimentary Pharmacology and Therapeutics.
