A new study has found that moderate coffee drinkers, consuming between 1.5 to 3.5 cups of coffee a day, are less likely to die during a 7-year follow-up period compared to non-coffee drinkers.
The results were significant for those who drank unsweetened coffee or coffee sweetened with sugar, while findings for consumers of artificially sweetened coffee were inconclusive. The study has been published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
Past studies on coffee’s health effects have established a correlation between coffee consumption and a lower risk of death.
However, these studies did not distinguish between unsweetened coffee and coffee consumed with sugar or artificial sweeteners.
The Study and Its Findings
Researchers from Southern Medical University in Guangzhou, China utilized data from the U.K. Biobank study health behavior questionnaire to assess the relationship between the consumption of sugar-sweetened, artificially sweetened, and unsweetened coffee with all-cause and cause-specific mortality.
The study involved more than 171,000 U.K. participants without known heart disease or cancer.
The study found that during the 7-year follow-up period, participants who consumed any amount of unsweetened coffee were 16 to 21% less likely to die compared to those who did not drink coffee.
Further, participants who consumed 1.5 to 3.5 daily cups of sugar-sweetened coffee were 29 to 31% less likely to die than non-coffee drinkers.
Interestingly, adults who drank sugar-sweetened coffee only added about 1 teaspoon of sugar per cup of coffee on average. Results for consumers of artificially sweetened coffee, however, were inconclusive.
An accompanying editorial notes that while coffee has qualities that could provide health benefits, confounding variables, such as differences in socioeconomic status, diet, and other lifestyle factors, might impact the findings.
Cautions and Recommendations
The study authors caution that their findings are based on data at least 10 years old and collected from a country where tea is as popular a beverage as coffee.
They also note that the average amount of daily sugar per cup of coffee recorded in this analysis is much lower than in specialty drinks served at popular coffee chain restaurants.
Also, many coffee consumers may drink it in place of other beverages, complicating comparisons to non-drinkers.
Based on this data, clinicians can advise their patients that for most coffee drinkers, there’s no need to eliminate the beverage from their diet. However, caution should be exercised with high-calorie specialty coffees.
If you care about nutrition, please read studies about a breakfast linked to better blood vessel health, and drinking too much coffee could harm people with high blood pressure.
For more information about health, please see recent studies about unhealthy habits that may increase high blood pressure risk, and results showing plant-based protein foods may help reverse diabetes.
The study was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
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