Researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center followed 354,957 adults in the UK Biobank for a median of 13 years and found that those who drank five or more cups of coffee a day had a 32% lower risk of cirrhosis, a 47% lower risk of liver cancer and a 42% lower risk of dying from liver disease.
The findings were published in July 2026 in Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology. They come at a time when an estimated 31.2% of American adults, or nearly 62 million people, live with metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease, the condition long known as non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
Decaf worked too
A striking detail cuts against the usual assumption that caffeine is doing the heavy lifting. Both caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee were tied to lower liver risk in the Cedars-Sinai analysis, pointing to other compounds in the bean.
"Previous studies suggested that coffee might benefit the liver, but most were smaller or looked at only one piece of the puzzle," said Hyunseok Kim, MD, MPH, PhD, the study's corresponding author and an assistant professor of medicine at Cedars-Sinai.
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Because the study is observational, it cannot prove that coffee itself causes the lower risk. People who drink several cups a day may differ from non-drinkers in ways the researchers could not fully measure.
What may be doing the work
Earlier research points to how coffee interacts with liver tissue. A 2021 review in Nutrients described how coffee compounds appear to interfere with hepatic stellate cells, which are the cells that lay down scar tissue when the liver is under stress. The same review noted that coffee activates the body's antioxidant response through a pathway called Nrf2, which switches on protective enzymes inside liver cells.
The authors were candid about what is still unknown. They wrote that it is "still unclear which element of coffee confers benefit," whether caffeine, polyphenols such as chlorogenic acid, or the oily diterpenes cafestol and kahweol.
Benefit shows up at modest doses
Readers who cannot stomach five cups a day are not shut out. A 2015 meta-analysis in PLoS One pooled 16 studies covering more than 135,000 people and found that drinking two or more cups a day was linked to about a 47% lower risk of cirrhosis compared with no coffee. Even light or moderate intake showed a smaller but still measurable protective association.
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The Cedars-Sinai team echoed that everyday message. "Our findings support moderate coffee consumption for people who already enjoy and tolerate it well," said Ju Dong Yang, MD, medical director of the Liver Cancer Program and the study's senior author.
Coffee has been linked in earlier research to a lower risk of liver cancer as well, adding to the pattern the new UK data confirm on a much larger scale.
None of this makes coffee a treatment. Anyone with signs of liver trouble, or with a family history of liver disease, should talk to a doctor rather than reach for another cup. And the Cedars-Sinai researchers say the ingredient question is still open. "The next step in our research is to identify the specific compounds in coffee that are responsible for these liver-protective associations," said Shelly Lu, MD, the Women's Guild Chair in Gastroenterology at Cedars-Sinai.
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This article is made and published by Mie Hermansen, who may have used AI in the preparation.