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October 2015
A Huge New Study Says Drinking Coffee Can Make You Live Longer—but With One Creamy, Sugary Catch
Study after study shows that drinking coffee is linked with positive health effects. As Inc. colleague Bill Murphy Jr. details in a recent viral post about women who drink coffee every day:
- A study of 500,000 people published in JAMA Internal Medicine found people who drink several cups of coffee a day enjoy increased longevity.
- A study published in European Heart Journal found that drinking coffee specifically in the morning was associated with a lower risk of death or cardiovascular disease.
- A study published in Annals of Internal Medicine found that people between the ages of 37 and 73 who drank between 1.5 and 3.5 cups of coffee each day had up to a 30 percent lower chance of dying from any cause during the seven-year study period than those who did not.
- A study published in Journal of the American Medical Directors Association determined people who drank a lot of coffee (three to four cups a day or more) were twice as likely to avoid becoming physically frail as they aged into their 70s.
And there are studies that show coffee can make you smarter, more productive, a better problem-solver, and can even make you happier.
So, yeah: Coffee does a lot of cool stuff.
But it does seem to matter how you drink it.
Cream and Sugar?
A study published last month in The Journal of Nutrition tracked the coffee consumption of approximately 50,000 people for 11 years: how much coffee they drank and whether (and how much) cream and sugar they added.
The results?
- Drinking one to three cups of black coffee each day was linked to a 15 percent lower risk of all-cause mortality. But …
- Adding more than half a teaspoon of sugar to each cup canceled out the effects. And so did …
- Adding more than 1 gram of saturated fat (3.5 tablespoons of whole milk or one tablespoon of half-and-half) to each cup.
Evidently black coffee is good for you, creamy and sweet coffee not so much.
While the researchers say the “health benefits of coffee consumption may be diminished when sugar and saturated fat are added,” correlation isn’t causation. Maybe there’s a chemical reaction involved in adding sugar to coffee that cancels out bioactive compounds like caffeine, chlorogenic acid, and polyphenol, which have been associated with antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, and anti-carcinogenic properties.
Or maybe people who add a lot of sugar or cream to their coffee tend to consume a relatively high amount of sugar and saturated fat in general. Saturated fat is linked to a higher risk of cardiovascular disease. Excessive sugar consumption is linked to obesity, metabolic disorders, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, etc.
Hold the Cream and Sugar
Consume too much saturated fat, or sugar, and most or all of the health benefits you might have enjoyed from drinking coffee probably disappear.
It’s a little like drinking a diet soda with a deep-fried, battered-up, dipping sauce-drenched, 1,900-plus-calorie Blooming Onion because you’re trying to lose weight. The diet soda has fewer calories than a non-diet soda, so where your diet is concerned, that’s a good thing … but yeah.
Ultimately, individual longevity comes down to a number of factors, chief among them diet, exercise, and sleep habits. Eat healthy and exercise regularly, but only get four or five hours of sleep a night, and your overall health will suffer. Sleep eight hours a night but eat a crap diet and live a sedentary lifestyle, and your overall health will suffer.
That’s the real lesson to be learned from this study, and the majority of other health studies. For example, one on olive oil. Research published in Food & Function that studied over 2.7 million people across 28 years found that consuming two tablespoons of olive oil a day was associated with a 15 percent lower risk of heart disease and a 23 percent lower risk of heart disease-related death. (Olive oil contains both good-for-your-heart monounsaturated fat and polyphenols that can help control blood sugar and reduce blood pressure.)
Yet it depends on how you consume your olive oil. When part of a Mediterranean diet (fish, fruits, veggies, and relatively few processed foods) a study published in PLOS One found that average life expectancy increases by eight or more years, even if only adopted when you’re in your 60s.
Down a couple of tablespoonfuls a day while mostly eating fast food? Probably won’t help much.
So if you tend to load up your coffee with sugar or creamer, consider cutting back a bit. More important, consider cutting back on how much sugar or saturated fat you consume overall. Move more every day. Try to get a little more sleep every night.
That way you’ll get to enjoy the benefits from drinking coffee … and enjoy the benefits from living a healthier lifestyle.
Win-win.
The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.
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