In recent years, coffee use has been linked to a number of health benefits, including lowering the risk of type 2 diabetes and boosting liver function, as well as making us feel more alert and awake.

But now scientists from Guangzhou’s Southern Medical University have found that people who drink 1.5 to 3.5 cups of unsweetened or sugar-sweetened coffee per day were less likely to die over a 7-year period than those who didn’t drink coffee.

International research discovered that people who drank a moderate amount of coffee over a 7-year follow-up period were less likely to die. This was true whether the coffee was sweetened or not.

A cohort study found that adults who drank 1.5 to 3.5 cups of unsweetened or sugar-sweetened coffee per day were less likely to die over a 7-year period than those who didn’t drink coffee.

The outcomes were less evident for individuals who took artificial sweeteners. Annals of Internal Medicine published the findings.

Previous research into the health impacts of coffee has revealed that it is linked to a lower risk of death, but did not differentiate between unsweetened coffee and coffee with sugar or artificial sweeteners.

Researchers from Guangzhou’s Southern Medical University used data from the UK Biobank study’s health behavior questionnaire to look at the links between sugar-sweetened, artificially sweetened, and unsweetened coffee intake and overall and cause-specific death. To determine coffee intake habits, more than 171,000 people from the United Kingdom without known heart disease or cancer were asked many dietary and health behavior questionnaires.

The authors discovered that participants who drank any amount of unsweetened coffee were 16 to 21% less likely to die over the 7-year follow-up period than those who did not.

They also discovered that those who consumed 1.5 to 3.5 cups of sugared coffee per day were 29 to 31 percent less likely to die than those who did not.

Adults who drank sugar-sweetened coffee added just around 1 teaspoon of sugar per cup of coffee, according to the authors. Participants who drank coffee with artificial sweeteners had inconclusive results.

While coffee has qualities that may make health benefits possible, confounding variables such as more difficult to measure differences in socioeconomic status, diet, and other lifestyle factors may impact findings, according to any accompanying editorial by the editors of Annals of Internal Medicine.

The authors also point out that the participant data is at least ten years old and came from a place where tea is a popular beverage.

They point out that the average daily sugar content per cup of coffee in this study is substantially lower than speciality drinks at popular coffee chain restaurants, and that many coffee drinkers may substitute it for other beverages, making comparisons to non-drinkers more difficult.

On the basis of these findings, practitioners can inform their patients that the majority of coffee drinkers do not need to exclude the beverage from their diet, but speciality coffees with higher calorie content should be avoided.

Image Credit: Getty

You were reading: New Study Reveals Unexpected Benefits of Sweetened Coffee