Today we spend more holidays in sunny exotic places, but this increased exposure to sun can cause skin cancer, especially amongst light-skinned racial types, due to ultraviolet-B (UVB) radiation. And here comes the controversial and at the same time praised coffee. Coffee consume could cut the risk of skin cancer by 35 %, according to a new research published in the European Journal of Cancer Prevention.

Subjects drinking over six cups of caffeinated coffee daily decreased their likelihood of developing skin cancer by 35 %, while 2-3 cups lowered it by 12 %. The precise effect of coffee is not known, but caffeine is believed to impede cells dividing in the tumor, or to work as an antioxidant.

About 75,000 new cases of non-melanoma skin cancer (NMSC), the less aggressive type of skin cancer, are detected annually in the US, and the number of skin cancers could go to 1,000,000 each year in the US. "Among the possible explanations for caffeine's protective effect on NMSC are an antioxidant effect and/or inhibition of DNA synthesis and cell division.", said lead author Dr Ernest Abel, of Wayne State University, Detroit.

The research was made on over 77,300 white women aged 50 and over; women of other racial types were not selected because they display much lower levels of the disease, but the results are valid for men and women of all ages. The consume of decaffeinated coffee induced no effect on the subjects' likelihood of developing skin cancer.

A research published in July by a Rutgers revealed that coffee and exercising fight against sun-induced skin cancer. Mice on caffeine presented a 95 % rise in UVB-induced apoptosis (cell death, instead of tumor forming in the cells whose DNA had been broken by UV light), the exercising mice a 120 % increase, while the mice that both ingested caffeine and exercising an increase of 400 % compared to the control group.