It has become a national pastime but our obsession with drinking coffee could be having unexpected health benefits and even increasing our lifespan by up to nine minutes a day, new research suggests.

Two new studies, including the largest ever conducted into coffee drinking, have found that imbibing even a single cup a day reduces the risk of dying early from any cause, and dramatically cuts the chance of death from digestive problems.

People who consumed just one 350ml cup each day slashed their risk of dying early by 12 per cent over 16 years, while three cups reduced the risk by 18 per cent.

Prof Sir David Spiegelhalter, Winton Professor for the Public Understanding of Risk at the University of Cambridge, calculated that, if causal, it meant a cup of coffee a day extended the average life of a man by three months and a woman by a month.

“Pro-rata, that’s as if that cup of coffee puts, on average, around nine minutes on a man’s life, and around three minutes on a woman’s. So perhaps we should relax and enjoy it,” he said.