Coffee is one of the world's most widely-enjoyed drinks. Now, a new research suggests that if you drink enough coffee, it might help you avoid certain kinds of cancer. Dr. Mia Hashibe of the University of Utah School of Medicine was interested in the connection between coffee drinking and certain cancers of the head and neck. Researchers have looked into this before, but without reaching any firm conclusions. She said, "So this finding from our new study was quite a surprise. We didn't really have any expectation of which direction it could go into." To sort out the confusion, Hashibe and her assistants used statistical ( ) techniques to, in effect, make one big study out of the earlier smaller studies. She explained,  "Thanks to the earlier studies, we have a lot more power than earlier studies that looked at this. And we included 4,000 cancer patients who have cancer of the mouth and throat. And then 9,000 controls, people who do not have cancer. ' Those studies--in Europe and the United States--found that people who drank a lot of coffee were less likely to develop cancers of the mouth and throat. "We saw a protective effect for drinking more than 4 cups of coffee per day," Hashibe said. "This was the 40 percent decrease in risk. We did not see the same effect for drinking three cups or less per day." Mia Hashibe said there was a weak connection between cancer risk and drinking coffee without caffeine. And she and her assistants found no proof that drinking tea provided the same protection as drinking Coffee. Their research is published in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention. Hashibe says it is not clear how coffee might protect drinkers from certain cancers. "There are a few chemicals that are known to be antioxidants  in coffee. So we are thinking perhaps they are playing some sort of protective role against several cancers." Dr. Hashibe expected nothing of her research because   _
it was impossible to get the desired result the research was much surprising in fact no conclusions had been reached before the research team lacked faith in success