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Coffee lovers may live longer than those who don’t imbibe — with lower risks of early death from heart disease and neurological conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, a large U.S. study finds.

Researchers said the study, published online Nov. 16 in Circulation, adds to a large body of evidence on the good side of coffee.

People often think of coffee-drinking as a bad habit that they need to break, said study leader Dr. Frank Hu, a professor of nutrition and epidemiology at Harvard School of Public Health in Boston.

But, Hu said, many studies have linked moderate coffee intake to lower risks of developing various diseases — from heart disease and diabetes, to liver cancer, to neurological diseases such as Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer’s.

His team’s study, funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, adds another layer of evidence. It found that coffee drinkers were not only less likely to develop certain diseases — they also tended to live longer.

Over 30 years, nonsmokers who drank three to five cups of coffee a day were 15 percent less likely to die of any cause, versus nondrinkers. Specifically, they had lower rates of death from heart disease, stroke, neurological conditions and suicide.

Both regular coffee and decaf were linked to longer survival, the study found.

None of that proves coffee, itself, extends people’s lives or directly protects against certain diseases, Hu said. Other factors might explain the connection.

But, Hu added, his team did account for many of those factors. And the coffee benefit remained.

The findings are based on more than 200,000 U.S. doctors, nurses and other health professionals who were surveyed repeatedly over almost three decades. During that time, almost 32,000 study participants died.

It turned out that people who drank one to five cups of coffee at the outset had lower odds of dying during the study period when other lifestyle habits and certain health problems, such as high blood pressure and diabetes, were taken into account.

The relationship grew stronger when the researchers looked only at nonsmokers: Those who drank three to five cups of coffee a day were 15 percent less likely to die during the study period, compared with adults who didn’t drink coffee. Lower risks were even seen among the heaviest coffee drinkers (more than five cups a day), who had a 12 percent lower death risk than nondrinkers.

“The body of evidence does suggest coffee can fit into a healthy lifestyle,” Hu said.

That evidence, Hu noted, has already been incorporated into the latest U.S. dietary guidelines, which say that a healthy diet can include up to three to five cups of coffee a day.

But overall lifestyle is key, Hu said. That is, there’s a difference between a person who gets little sleep, then uses coffee to function during the day, and a person who sleeps well, exercises, and eats a balanced diet that includes some coffee.

Alice Lichtenstein, a spokesperson for the American Heart Association, agreed.

“This doesn’t mean you should start drinking coffee in the hopes of getting health benefits,” said Lichtenstein, who is also a professor of nutrition science and policy at Tufts University in Boston.

But, she added, the new findings build on years of evidence that coffee is not the bad guy many believe it is. “There’s this lingering idea that coffee must be bad for you because it’s enjoyable,” Lichtenstein said. “It’s almost like we’ve been trying to find something wrong with it.”

There are caveats, though. “You do need to be careful about what you’re putting in your coffee,” Lichtenstein pointed out. Some milk is fine, she said, but watch the sugar and heavy cream.

And why would coffee be related to health benefits? It’s not clear from this study, Hu said, but other research has suggested that compounds in coffee can reduce inflammation, act as antioxidants, and improve blood sugar regulation, among other things.

Also, when it comes to some neurological conditions, such as Parkinson’s disease, Hu said, there’s evidence that caffeine offers benefits.

Children who eat more foods with gluten before they’re 2 years old have a greater risk of developing celiac disease if they carry a genetic risk factor for the condition, new research suggests.

“This finding offers insight into why some, but not all, children at genetic risk develop celiac disease,” lead study author Carin Andren Aronsson, from the department of clinical sciences at Lund University in Sweden, said in a prepared statement.

“Our study provides convincing evidence that the amount of gluten ingested at an early age plays a role in disease course,” Aronsson added.

It’s important to note, however, that while the study found an association between eating more gluten early in life and celiac disease, it wasn’t designed to prove a cause-and-effect relationship.

The findings were published online in the journal Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology. The study was funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health.

About 1 percent to 3 percent of the world’s population has celiac disease, according to background information in the report. Celiac disease is an autoimmune condition that causes damage to the small intestine when someone with the disease eats foods containing gluten, according to the Celiac Disease Foundation. Gluten is a protein found in grains, such as wheat, rye and barley.

For the study, the researchers matched 146 children with celiac disease to 436 children who didn’t have the disease. All of the children were from Sweden. Each group shared the same age, gender and specific combination of genetic risk factors. Approximately half of white people have genetic risk factors for celiac disease, the study authors noted.

The children in the study were between 15 months old and 8 years old when they were diagnosed with celiac disease.

The children’s gluten intake was tracked at 9, 12, 18 and 24 months of age. Babies in Sweden tend to consume more gluten-containing foods than they do in other countries, the study authors pointed out. Foods with gluten are also often introduced into a baby’s diet sooner than tends to occur in other countries, the researchers said.

The researchers found that children who consumed more than 5 grams of gluten per day before age 2 had a higher risk of celiac disease than those who consumed less than 3.4 grams of gluten per day.

Dr. Joseph Levy is a professor of pediatrics and director of special projects in the division of pediatric gastroenterology at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York City. He said, “If you are to conclude something from this study, it’s that reducing the amount of gluten in the first few years of life might reduce the risk of celiac in children who are predisposed genetically for celiac disease.” Levy was not involved with the study.

Another expert agreed.

“At this point, it’s too early to say all newborns should moderate their gluten intake. But those at the highest risk, with affected parents or siblings, may want to avoid doses higher than 5 grams per day during early life,” said Dr. Arun Swaminath, director of the inflammatory bowel disease program at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City.

“Whether there is a ‘low but safe’ boundary isn’t clear,” Swaminath added.

But, Levy emphasized, skipping or reducing gluten for a few years is not a guarantee of escaping celiac disease.

“What this study doesn’t tell us is what happens later in life because you don’t only develop celiac disease in childhood,” Levy explained. “You can develop celiac disease at any time in life. It could occur from a trigger, such as a viral infection, or something else. So what would be very interesting is to see what happens to these cohorts of children later.”

There’s also no need for parents to rush out to test their children for the genetic risk factors for celiac disease, Levy said.

 

Although it’s no one’s favorite method, a rectal thermometer is the best way to determine someone’s body temperature, experts say.

Accurate body temperature readings are important because they are used to make diagnoses, check for infectious diseases, evaluate whether or not a treatment is working, and guide patient management, the study authors explained.

Rectal thermometers are considered the gold standard, the researchers said. But the accuracy of thermometers used in the mouth or under the arm (peripheral thermometers) has been unclear.

So, the researchers reviewed 75 published studies. They found that peripheral thermometers are less accurate than rectal thermometers, particularly for low-grade fevers.

The findings were published online Nov. 16 in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine.

Health care workers should use rectal thermometers when a patient’s temperature will influence diagnosis and treatment, the researchers said in a news release from the American College of Physicians.

Rectal thermometers can be used for most children and adults. When that isn’t possible, a calibrated ear thermometer (or a bladder thermometer for patients with bladder catheters) are good alternatives, according to Dr. Daniel Niven from Alberta Health Services in Canada, and colleagues.

– Kitchen utensils such as knives and graters can spread bacteria between different types of produce, a new study finds.

University of Georgia researchers contaminated different types of fruits and vegetables with bacteria such as salmonella and E. coli. They cut the produce with a knife or shredded it with a grater, then used the unwashed utensils on other produce.

Both utensils spread the bacteria to other types of produce, the study found.

The researchers also found that certain types of produce contaminated knives to different degrees.

“For items like tomatoes, we tended to have a higher contamination of the knives than when we cut strawberries,” said lead author Marilyn Erickson, an associate professor in the department of food science and technology.

“We don’t have a specific answer as to why there are differences between the different produce groups. But we do know that once a pathogen gets on the food, it’s difficult to remove,” she said in a university news release.

Further testing revealed that brushes and peelers also transfer bacteria between produce.

Many people don’t know that kitchen utensils can spread bacteria, Erickson said.

“Just knowing that utensils may lead to cross-contamination is important,” she said. “With that knowledge, consumers are then more likely to make sure they wash them in between uses.”

Connections between different parts of the brain weaken with age, but new research suggests that being physically fit can boost long-term brain function.

A study from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign found that age-related differences in the brains of older adults varied, depending on their level of aerobic endurance.

“Our study provides the strongest evidence to date that fitness in an older adult population can have substantial benefits to brain health in terms of the functional connections of different regions of the brain,” Arthur Kramer, director of the Beckman Institute, said in a university news release.

The study involved both younger and older adults. Using functional MRI brain scans, the researchers assessed the strength of the connections in different parts of the participants’ brains while they were awake but not performing any particular task.

Unsurprisingly, the younger adults had stronger brain connections than the older participants. But among the older people, the investigators found a relationship between their level of fitness and the strength of the connections between certain areas of their brains.

“The idea that fitness could be related to brain health regardless of one’s physical activity levels is intriguing because it suggests there could be clues in how the body adapts for some people more than others from regular activity,”study leader Michelle Voss, who was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Illinois at the time of the study,