A health drink? We get more alert, slimmer, happier and the risk of serious diseases diminish when we drink coffee. So go ahead and have yourself another cup of java while you read this.

1. Bertil Fredholm, professor of pharmacology at the Karolinska Institute, has done research on coffee and its effect on our health for 40 years. According to him, coffee speeds up metabolism, but it can also safeguard us against diabetes type 2. “The effect of insulin becomes stronger when you drink coffee, which is why it decreases the risk for diabetes 2,” he says.

2. According to a major study published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, women can reduce their risk for cardiovascular diseases by drinking one to three cups of coffee per day. The study was done with the help of 27,000 women between the ages of 55 and 69 over a period of 15 years. The highest mortality was found among women who didn’t drink any coffee at all.

3. It makes you happy. 51,000 women were followed for 10 years by researchers at Harvard, and their coffee consumption was carefully registered. The women who drank the most, four cups or more a day, had a 20% less chance of getting depressed. No such decreased risk was found among the women who drank decaffeinated coffee.

4. Coffee makes your skin glow. It may counteract cellulites and is an astringent. Make your own coffee scrub by mixing ground coffee and olive oil. The coffee will work as a “peeler” and remove dead skin cells.

5. According to Professor Fredholm, coffee also diminishes the risk for Parkinson’s and different kinds of tumors, like prostate cancer and skin cancer. “Coffee blocks the body’s adenosine (the binding of adenosine causes drowsiness by slowing down nerve cell activity). That way you lose less dopamine in your brain during aging, and the body’s defense against tumors gets stronger.”

Read also: Once Swedes started paying attention to what was really in their coffee cups, the people behind the counter at the coffee shops also came into focus.