Medical scholars who analysed more than 200 studies say moderate coffee drinking is not harmful to people's health and could help to prevent heart disease and other chronic illnesses.
"Coffee consumption seems generally safe within usual levels of intake ... and more likely to benefit health than harm [it]," the scholars wrote in the British Medical Journal (BMJ).
Analysis of the 200 studies linked daily consumption of three or four cups of coffee with the largest risk reduction for several diseases, said the scholars, led by Robin Poole, a medical researcher at the University of Southampton.
The team found that drinking three cups of coffee a day was "associated with the greatest benefit in terms of cardiovascular disease, coronary heart disease, and stroke, when compared with not drinking coffee".
Three cups of coffee per day was associated with mortality risks that were 19 per cent lower for cardiovascular disease, 16 per cent lower for coronary heart disease and 30 per cent lower for stroke, they said in the BMJ.
But co-author Paul Roderick, also from the University of Southampton, cautioned that it was still too early to say if coffee consumption had led directly to the reduced risks.
"Factors such as age, whether people smoked or not and how much exercise they took could all have had an effect," Roderick told the BBC.
The study also supported research suggesting that pregnant women should avoid coffee.
