Drinking sweetened, unsweetened coffee may lower risk of death: Study

According to a recent study, persons who drank moderate volumes of unsweetened coffee or coffee sweetened with sugar each day (1.5 to 3.5 cups) were less likely to pass away over the course of a 7-year follow-up period than non-coffee drinkers.

Less was known about the outcomes for individuals who utilised artificial sweeteners. The Annals of Internal Medicine publishes the findings. Although prior research on the health effects of coffee concluded that drinking it lowers mortality risk, it did not differentiate between coffee consumed with sugar or artificial sweeteners and coffee consumed unsweetened.

Researchers from Southern Medical University in Guangzhou, China utilised data from the U.K. The intake of sugar-sweetened, artificially sweetened, and unsweetened coffee was compared to all-cause and cause-specific mortality using a health behaviour questionnaire from a biobank research.

More than 171,000 participants from the UK without a history of cancer or heart disease, participants were asked a series of dietary and health-related questionnaires to ascertain their coffee use patterns. The people who drank any amount of unsweetened coffee were 16–21% less likely to pass away over the 7-year follow-up period than participants who did not.

They also found that participants who drank 1.5 to 3.5 daily cups of coffee sweetened with sugar were 29 to 31 percent less likely to die than participants who did not drink coffee. The authors noted that adults who drank sugar-sweetened coffee added only about 1 teaspoon of sugar per cup of coffee on average. Results were inconclusive for participants who used artificial sweeteners in their coffee.

Benefits of Coffee

Any accompanying editorial by the editors of Annals of Internal Medicine notes that while coffee has qualities that could make health benefits possible, confounding variables including more difficult to measure differences in socioeconomic status, diet, and other lifestyle factors may impact findings. The authors add that the participant data is at least 10 years old and collected from a country where tea is a similarly popular beverage.

They warn that the average daily sugars per cup of coffee recorded in this analysis are much lower than specialty drinks in popular coffee restaurant chains and that many coffee drinkers may Drinking it in place of a beverage generates comparisons with people who don’t drink. harder. . Based on this data, clinicians can tell their patients that most coffee drinkers don’t necessarily eliminate the beverage from their diet, but be wary of other types of coffee. Specialty coffee is higher in calories.

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