According to a new study, in maintaining healthy liver, drinking decaffeinated coffee is a good as drinking regular coffee. It does not matter if you drank regular or decaf, people in the research who drank great volumes of coffee on a regular basis had lesser degrees of liver enzymes abnormalities. This shows that a chemical compound in coffee aside from caffeine can make the liver healthy.

Other studies have discovered that taking coffee is related with lower risks of having nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, diabetes, liver cancer and cirrhosis. According to the lead researcher Dr. Qian Xiao, of the National Cancer Institute in Behesda, Maryland, in an official statement, "Prior research found that drinking coffee may have a possible protective effect on the liver. However, the evidence is not clear if that benefit may extend to decaffeinated coffee."

To address the issue about decaf, Dr. Xiao and his co-workers employed data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which is a research performed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to examine the health of the people residing in the United States. In this study, respondents went through physical examination like blood tests aside from the interview.

The study selected 27,800 respondents aged 20 years old and above who declared how much they consumed coffee every day. The research team also checked their blood samples for some strings for liver health, like alkaline phosphatase, alanine aminotransferase, aspartate aminotransferase and gamma-glutamyl transaminase. High volumes of liver enzymes levels may be a symptom of liver inflammation or liver damage.

The outcomes presented that people who drank more than three cups a day have lesser volumes of the four enzymes, than the people who did not drink any type of coffee

Amazingly, it didn't matter if a person drank decaf or regular coffee, the impact on the levels of liver enzyme was almost the same. Dr. Xiao added, "Our findings link total and decaffeinated coffee intake to lower liver enzyme levels. Further studies are needed to identify what component of coffee is responsible for this effect."