Even adding a little sweetener won’t hurt!
According to according to a recently published study in the Annals of Internal Medicine, drinking coffee every day may help you live a longer, healthier life, even if you add sugar. Association of Sugar-Sweetened, Artificially Sweetened, and Unsweetened Coffee Consumption With All-Cause and Cause-Specific Mortality. The scientists behind this study are in China, where tea has always been the most popular drink, not coffee. The primary authors of the article are Dan Liu, MD, Zhi-Hao Li, MD, Dong Shen, MD, and Pei-Dong Zhang, MD. Here is the chart they used to illustrate their findings,
If you are like me and drink two to four cups of coffee a day with a little bit of natural sugar, never artificial, then you are in the middle of the chart. We have good reason to smile.
Researchers from Southern Medical University in Guangzhou, China, looked at data on coffee habits and health from more than 171,000 UK residents who didn’t have cancer or heart disease at the start of the study over a period of seven years.
Previously, evidence has suggested coffee drinkers live longer; but the researchers in China wanted to push back on that study, and test whether the longevity benefit was true, even when people add sugar to their daily brew.
The earlier study was a meta-analysis published May 4, 2019 in the European Journal of Epidemiology, entitled Coffee consumption and all-cause and cause-specific mortality: a meta-analysis . This study was by Youngyo Kim, Youjin Je , and Edward Giovannucci. It looked at forty prior studies on coffee and longevity and found:
“Moderate coffee consumption (e.g. 2-4 cups/day) was associated with reduced all-cause and cause-specific mortality, compared to no coffee consumption.”
The new study considering the impact of sweeteners looked at 171,616 participants (mean age, 55.6 years) who were without cardiovascular disease or cancer. The data was extracted from the UK Biobank, as was the earlier research. The dietary consumption of sugar-sweetened, artificially sweetened, and unsweetened coffee was self-reported by the participants.
It is very interesting to note that the users of artificially sweetened coffee did suffer a decline in benefits, but not the users of sugar. In fact, a little sugar helped a lot. You, good news! Specifically, the study of data found that people who regularly drank unsweetened coffee were 16% to 21% less likely to die during the study than their peers who didn’t drink coffee. But the study participants who drank between one and four cups of lightly sweetened coffee per day were 29% to 31% less likely to die during the study. The official conclusion of the study was:
Moderate consumption of unsweetened and sugar-sweetened coffee was associated with lower risk for death.