Washington (USA): A new study has found that adults who drink moderate amounts (1.5 to 3.5 cups per day) of unsweetened coffee or sugar-sweetened coffee, compared to non-coffee drinkers, had 7 Less likely to die during the year. follow-up period. The results were less clear for those using artificial sweeteners. The findings are published in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Previous studies looking at the health effects of coffee found that coffee consumption is associated with a lower risk of death, but did not differentiate between coffee and coffee consumed with added sugar or artificial sweeteners.
Researchers at Southern Medical University in Guangzhou, China, used data from the UK Biobank Study Health Behavior Questionnaire to evaluate the relationship of sugar-sweetened, artificially sweetened, and no-sugar coffee with all-cause and cause-specific mortality. done for. More than 171,000 UK participants without known heart disease or cancer were asked a series of dietary and health behavior questions to determine their coffee consumption habits. The authors found that during the 7-year follow-up period, participants who drank unsweetened coffee were 16 to 21 percent less likely to die than participants who did not drink coffee. They also found that participants who drank 1.5 to 3.5 cups of sugar-sweetened coffee daily 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 1 teaspoon of sugar per cup of coffee, on average. The results were inconclusive for participants who used artificial sweeteners in their coffee.
An accompanying editorial by the editors of the Annals of Internal Medicine states that coffee has properties that may make possible health benefits, with more difficult-to-measure differences in socioeconomic status, diet and other lifestyle factors. Including confounding variables can affect the findings. The authors state that participant data is at least 10 years old and collected from a country where tea is an equally popular beverage. They caution that the average amount of daily sugar per cup of coffee recorded in this analysis is much lower than that of specialty drinks at popular coffee chain restaurants, and that many coffee consumers may drink it in place of other beverages that are non-alcoholic. Make it harder than the drinkers. , Based on this data, physicians can tell their patients that most coffee drinkers do not need to eliminate the beverage from their diet, but instead need to be cautious about high-calorie specialty coffees.