Drinking coffee has a completely shocking new benefit, so excuse us while we pour another cup

If you’re pretty much obsessed with drinking coffee, prepare to send major love to this group of researchers at Stanford University School of Medicine. Why? Because they just found out that drinking coffee has a surprising new health benefit, specifically that it just might help us fight disease as we age. See? We knew coffee wouldn’t do us wrong.

The study, published in Nature Medicine, came to the conclusion that caffeine might help our bodies fight inflammation.

They sampled blood from nearly 100 people, and, apparently, older participants who reported drinking over 5 cups of coffee a day had lower levels of inflammation. The ability of caffeine to fight inflammation helps fight disease, the scientists explained.

One of the study’s lead authors David Furman explained ho this works to Time, saying,

"Most of the diseases of aging are not really diseases of aging, per se, but rather diseases of inflammation. The more caffeine people consumed, the more protected they were against a chronic state of inflammation. There was no boundary, apparently."

  A senior author of the study, Mark Davis, explained in a press release,

“That something many people drink — and actually like to drink — might have a direct benefit came as a surprise to us. What we’ve shown is a correlation between caffeine consumption and longevity. And we’ve shown more rigorously, in laboratory tests, a very plausible mechanism for why this might be so."

We’ll obviously keep an eye out for more research, but until then, we’ll be drinking coffee in the name of science. Cheers!