COFFEE ZAPS GALLSTONES.

Gallstones aren't cheap. They afflict more than 20 million Americans, causing 800,000 hospitalizations a year at a cost of more than $2 billion and immeasurable pain.

Michael Leitzmann and colleagues studied more than 46,000 healthy men who were 40 to 75 years old in 1986, when they entered the Health Professionals Followup Study. A decade later, 1,081 of them had been diagnosed with symptomatic gallstone disease. The researchers compared their diets with those of the men who had no gallstones.

Their findings: Men who drank two to three cups of regular (caffeine-containing) coffee a day had a 40 percent lower risk of gallstone disease than men who drank no regular coffee.

Tea and decaf coffee weren't linked to a lower risk of gallstones. Nor were caffeinated soft drinks, though only a small fraction of the men drank 16 ounces or more of them a day.

"Caffeine may prevent gallstones by slowing the gallbladder's ability to absorb fluids from bile," says Leitzmann. "But it could be some component of coffee other than caffeine that's responsible."

And, he adds, "we don't recommend that people take up coffee drinking for the sole purpose of preventing gallstone disease." If you're trying to reduce your risk, don't gain excess weight, says Leitzmann.

J. Amer. Med. Assoc. 281: 2106, 1999.