Latest health food is as close as your coffee maker

If you were around in the '70s or '80s, you remember the bas news. Coffee will give you cancer. Coffee will give you heart disease. Coffee can make you jittery and give you heart burn and indigestion.

There's no denying that too much caffeine can have bad effects, but a lot of those old studies didn't take other factors into account: Many coffee drinkers smoked, drank too much alcohol or engaged in other unhealthy behavior.

A new study of 208,500 men and women found that those who drank less than five cups of coffee, caffeinated or decaffeinated, have a lower risk of dying early from problems like heart disease, diabetes, brain conditions and suicide.

They can't conclusively confirm that coffee is the cause, but many compounds in coffee are known to help lower insulin resistance or inflammation, keys to better health.

While there was no significant link between coffee consumption and cancer mortality, there were "significant inverse associations" of mortality with consumption of one to five cups of coffee a day among "never smokers," cardiovascular disease, neurological diseases and suicide.

Since the study included both regular and decaf, apparently "other components in coffee besides caffeine might play a beneficial role meeting the association between long-term coffee consumption and risk of mortality."

That's not to say you should ignore doctors orders against drinking coffee, or limit the number of cups you down in a day.

But according to the study, at least you don't have to feel guilty about that morning cuppa java.