To get the most antioxidants from your cup of coffee, use a medium (not dark) roast, grind the beans (stored in an airtight container) right before brewing, and brew in an espresso maker or old-fashioned percolator (brewing with coffee filters tends to strip out some of the antioxidants).

I've always loved a cup of coffee in the morning—but I've come to love it even more over the years as more and more research is done about the health benefits of coffee. I wanted to recap some of the most recent studies to date, but first I wanted to share my own coffee story with you.

Before I even started thinking about launching an antioxidant-based skincare line, I traveled to places like Mexico, Jamaica, and South America, where I had the opportunity to visit coffee farms. And what I consistently heard and saw: coffee pickers had hands that were youthful looking…more youthful than the skin on the rest of their bodies, which was showing all the normal signs of aging (thanks to many hours spent in the sun): weathered, rough skin; wrinkles; and age spots. But the hands—which came into contact daily with the berry of the coffee plant—were not.

It was then that I discovered that this berry of the coffee plant (also called Coffea arabica), shown above, is one of the richest sources of health-promoting and anti-aging antioxidants. So I knew that I had to make this berry the key ingredient in a skincare line, which I decided to call REPLERE (which means "replenish" in Latin). The clinical research I did on the products helps back up what I saw with the coffee pickers' hands; after 12 weeks of twice-daily use, study participants showed an improvement in the firmness, clarity, roughness, hyperpigmentation, blotchy redness, fine lines and wrinkles, and overall brightness of their skin.

REPLERE is the only skincare product that taps into the restorative and youth-enhancing power of coffee.

But I wanted you to know this to help you understand why I'm such a huge fan of coffee. Here is some additional research about the benefits of coffee!

√ It helps lower your cancer risk. Brand-new research—presented at the American Association of Cancer Researchers meeting in San Diego—suggests that people who drink at least a cup a day have a lower risk of liver cancer compared to those who only indulge occasionally. Study participants were tracked for 18 years; it was the regular coffee drinkers who had up to a 42 reduced risk of this type of cancer! Beyond liver cancer, studies have suggested that coffee may be tied to reduced risk for head and neck cancers, colorectal cancers, prostate cancer, and bladder, endometrial, esophageal and pancreatic cancers.

√ It helps keep your heart healthy. Drinking two 8-ounce cups of coffee each day helps reduce your risk of heart failure by 11 percent, according to a study in the journal Circulation: Heart Failure.

√ It helps keep your vision sharp. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, food scientists say you may reap another health benefit from a daily cup of joe: prevention of deteriorating eyesight and possible blindness from retinal degeneration due to glaucoma, aging and diabetes.

√ It helps prevent diabetes. And speaking of diabetes, sipping four or more cups of coffee throughout the day may reduce your risk of developing Type 2 diabetes by 50 percent, says a recent study published in theJournal of Agricultural & Food Chemistry.

√ It helps lower depression. Researchers at Harvard School of Public Health found that women who drink two to three cups a day lowered their risk of depression by 15 percent. (The study was published in the journal Archives of Internal Medicine.)

√ It may help prevent Alzheimer's disease. A study published in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease found that drinking at least three cups of coffee a day could prevent the onset of this disease. Plus, a Finnish study found that those who drank three to five cups of coffee a day at midlife had a 65 percent lower risk of developing dementia or Alzheimer's disease in late-life than those who drank no coffee at all.

So there you have it: the latest research. Now you know why I'm such a huge fan.

Now, relax…and go have a cup of coffee!