London, July 10 (IANS): Maintain your love with coffee as it does not put you at the risk of developing obesity or diabetes, a gene-based study has said.

Danish researchers looked at genes as our genes play a role in how much coffee we drink in the course of a day.

So if you have the special coffee genes, you may be drinking more coffee than those not having the genes.

The results showed that coffee neither increases nor decreases the risk of lifestyle diseases like obesity and diabetes.

"We are the first to examine the link of the genes with high consumption of coffee," said Ask Tybjaeg Nordestgaard from the department of clinical biochemistry at Herlev and Gentofte Hospital in Denmark.

"These genes are completely independent of other lifestyle factors, and, therefore, drinking coffee in itself is not associated with lifestyle diseases," Nordestgaard added in a paper published in the International Journal of Epidemiology.

Along with researchers from University of Copenhagen, Nordestgaard analysed DNA and information about coffee drinking and lifestyle diseases from 93,000 Danes from the Copenhagen General Population Study.

The researchers studied the number of genes that affect our desire for coffee and examined whether a higher coffee consumption increases or decreases the risk of developing lifestyle diseases.

"We can see that the coffee genes are surprisingly not associated with a risk of developing Type 2 diabetes or obesity," they said.

"This suggests that drinking coffee neither causes nor protects against these lifestyle diseases," added Boerge Nordestgaard, clinical professor from University of Copenhagen.