It's once a month, and is a two-meal fast of both food and drink. Another concrete cultural practice that could make a difference is that Mormons abstain from alcohol, coffee, tea, and tobacco.
Life expectancy per cup of coffee consumed each days peaks at 2 cups a day. Which doesn't actually prove anything, but is at least suggestive. There are a whole bunch of health effects related to coffee, but in general you can get all the benefits with moderate consumption, but the negatives are in proportion to dose.
> Well, I wouldn't say drinking coffee or tea is a health benefit. Especially coffee.
OK. But that doesn't tell me much. :)
I brought this up because it has been conventional wisdom up until recently that you'd do better health-wise without coffee, while recently the topic has seemed to become more nuanced. Wikipedia lists both health risks and health benefits. It's not clear, to me, that it is straightforward to balance all the purported benefits and downsides and land on one or another conclusion.
As for tea, I have never seen that that is something that is unhealthy (assuming no extra ingredients like sugar). Conventional wisdom says that green tea is in fact very healthy. I haven't read much about the effects of black tea.
Personally I drink both coffee and tea without adding anything to them.
