This piece of information is for all coffee lovers, who often hear that coffee is not good for health and causes blood pressure and acidity.
As per a recent study, adults who drink moderate amounts (1.5 to 3.5 cups per day) of unsweetened coffee or coffee with sugar are less likely to die during a 7-year follow-up period.
Scroll down to learn more about the study and its outcome.
The study
The findings of the study published in Annals of Internal Medicine state that the outcomes were less evident for individuals who took artificial sweeteners. Previous studies observing the health effects of coffee have found that coffee consumption is associated with a lower risk of death. However, these studies did not distinguish between unsweetened coffee and coffee consumed with sugar or artificial sweeteners.
What do experts say?
Researchers from Southern Medical University in Guangzhou, China used data from the U.K. Biobank study health behaviour questionnaire to evaluate the associations of consumption of sugar-sweetened, artificially sweetened, and unsweetened coffee with all-cause and cause-specific mortality.
The analysis
More than 171,000 participants from the U.K. without known heart disease or cancer were asked several dietary and health behaviour questions to determine coffee consumption habits. The authors found that during the 7-year follow-up period, participants who drank any amount of unsweetened coffee were 16 to 21 percent less likely to die than participants who did not drink coffee.
The outcome
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.
Final words
They caution that the average amount of daily sugar per cup of coffee recorded in this analysis is much lower than specialty drinks at popular coffee chain restaurants, and many coffee consumers may drink it in place of other beverages which make comparisons to non-drinkers more difficult. Based on this data, clinicians can tell their patients that there is no need for most coffee drinkers to eliminate the beverage from their diet. However, they should be cautious about higher-calorie specialty coffees.
