THERE are many benefits to drinking coffee but recent studies say that if you drink your daily brew with sugar, it can actually help you live longer.
Is this true?
Verdict:
MAYBE
A new study that followed 171,616 participants for seven years suggests that coffee drinkers who added sugar into their morning brew live longer.
Compared to non-coffee drinkers, regular consumers of unsweetened coffee were 16% to 21% less likely to die during the seven-year follow-up period, according to the study that was published in the May 31 edition of the peer-reviewed Annals of Internal Medicine.
Those who added sugar and drank 1 1/2 -3 1/2 cups daily of sweetened coffee were 29% to 31% less likely to die, researchers said.
Sweetened coffee drinkers in the study added only one teaspoon of sugar, on average, researchers said.
Drinkers of unsweetened coffee did not rely on any specific amount of coffee daily and consumed ground, instant or decaffeinated coffee.
Researchers led by Dr Chen Mao at Southern Medical University in Guangzhou, China, analysed data collected on participants in the UK Biobank, a large-scale database with genetic and health information of UK participants.
None in the study had any known underlying heart disease or cancer at the outset of the study, which began in 2009 and tracked participants through 2018.
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After accounting for other demographic and lifestyle factors, the researchers found that "moderate consumption of unsweetened coffee and that of sugar-sweetened coffee were associated with similar reductions in risk for death" from any cause, as well as heart disease and cancer, they wrote.
So, does unsweetened coffee make you live longer? It's actually impossible to say with the evidence at hand.
As with most broad health studies involving many participants on a subject such as this, there are many factors that could influence a study.
Even if the researchers tried to rule out and account for as many factors as possible, there still could be influencing variables that go undetected.
What it does show is that there might be a link with coffee drinking and longevity but correlation does not imply causation.
In order for a hypothesis to become a theory (aka a fact), it would need to be not only testable but also replicable in a lab setting.
For something like this, in order to rule out as many variables as possible, participants would have to only be allowed to drink coffee and consume nothing else.
Then researchers would have to wait and see who lives the longest.
Not only would this be highly unethical, the data the researchers would end up with would still be only correlative and not causative.
The bottom line is that you can say that for most people, drinking a moderate amount of sweetened coffee is good for you.
This does not however give you a carte blanche to down as many sugarpop triple sweetened caramel macchiatoes as you want.
References:
2. https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M21-2977
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