Coffee drinking linked to lower mortality risk, new study finds

Study: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.acpjournals.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;10.7326&#x2F;M21-2977" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.acpjournals.org&#x2F;doi&#x2F;10.7326&#x2F;M21-2977</a><p>And before someone asks &quot;But what if it&#x27;s .. instead?&quot;: Yes, they controlled for lots of things:<p>&gt; lower risks for all-cause mortality after adjustment for lifestyle, sociodemographic, and clinical factors<p>The patient data is from UK Biobank, which has quite a bit about each participant. While they can&#x27;t control for everything (like factors that aren&#x27;t documented), they can control for a lot - probably including whatever possible confounder someone jumps to.<p>Although it&#x27;s still subject to the limitations of an observational study, 171,616 people is a big cohort, mortality is clearly measurable, and the observed effect is really large. It&#x27;s worth paying attention to.

As someone who also heavily uses UK Biobank in my research, I would just encourage people to think about this effect size and ask whether it&#x27;s plausible. If true, coffee has a more powerful effect on your risk of all-cause death than any drug for most diseases. It&#x27;s wildly implausible. The results are confounded. There is no causal anchor.<p>Having said that, coffee is great.

Another nutritional epidemiology study with an absurdly large effect size that is almost certainly due to confounding factors.<p>Yes, the researchers did an admirable job trying to control for confounders. Doesn&#x27;t matter. Confounding factors for health are impossible to adjust for, whether it&#x27;s healthy user bias or nutritional choices or a million other possible factors. There&#x27;s just no way to take this sort of causality seriously when humans are living infinitely complex lives. Stop wasting money and do an RCT.<p>Also, traditional media is still embarrassingly bad at communicating correlation vs causation. How does this get past a science editorial board.

&gt;There’s also the possibility that coffee drinkers tend to make healthier choices in general. They might opt for a cold brew or a cup of drip coffee instead of a less healthy source of caffeine, like an energy drink or soda, Dr. Goldberg added. “If you’re pounding Mountain Dew or Coca-Cola or Red Bull or all these other drinks, they have tons more sugar, all the artificial stuff — versus coffee, which is a generally unprocessed food.”<p>It sounds like we need a study comparing people who rarely drink anything but water vs coffee drinking vs energy drink&#x2F;soda drinking.

I wonder if it&#x27;s because coffee as an appetite suppressant causes colorific reduction in people - effectively, they eat less. Fasting has recently been proven to also lower mortality risk by a large amount.<p>&gt; Coffee suppresses your appetite because it contains chlorogenic acids which are a type of phytochemical compounds that help control hunger pangs and suppress your appetite. Because of this, you don’t need to drink caffeinated coffee to integrate it into your weight loss program; decaffeinated coffee will do just fine.<p>Source for the quote: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;energeticlifestyle.com&#x2F;how-to-use-coffee-as-an-appetite-suppressant&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;energeticlifestyle.com&#x2F;how-to-use-coffee-as-an-appet...</a><p>Pubmed source which corroborates coffee as an appetite suppressant: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pmc&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC6683100&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov&#x2F;pmc&#x2F;articles&#x2F;PMC6683100&#x2F;</a>

A lot of people that don&#x27;t drink coffee have heart issues. Even ones that don&#x27;t know they have those kinds of issues don&#x27;t drink coffee because it makes them feel bad. It&#x27;s typically the heart doing uncomfortable things for them.<p>And since they already have heart issues - ding ding ding. Correlation. It&#x27;s not that coffee is making people healthier, it&#x27;s just a substance that is addictive that people that don&#x27;t have heart issues drink.

Couple thoughts&#x2F;ideas for further research:<p>- Is sweetened coffee also adding creamer? I don&#x27;t know of many people who take coffee with sugar but no cream. They usually go together.<p>- Were coffee preparation methods at all considered? I don&#x27;t know if everyone in the trial was being served the same coffee or if respondents prepared coffee in whatever manner they liked and just reported how much coffee&#x2F;how sweet they made it. Different methods may require more or less sweetner, so the guy who takes it black might be e.g. doing a Chemex&#x2F;pourover, while the guy doing cream and sugar might be going through a standard drip. A third might be doing a French Press. The extractions from those methods will be wildly different.

A plausible theory is people who CANT drink coffee, or dont drink as much, have health issues that often prevent them from drinking coffee...

As usual I will ask: could this mean that people who can stand coffee have stronger hearts?<p>I can’t drink coffee because my heart will go crazy. Does that make me more at risk according to this study?

This is an interesting study. As someone who only drinks sweetened coffee, I will start stirring in some unsweetened coffee in order to get the health benefits.

A study described in the Dorito Effect took millions of grocery receipts and analyzed them. Turned out people who had wine in their carts also had an overall healthy selection of food at checkout. The customers who bought beer stuffed their carts with all kinds of junk.<p>So there is that. So much for &quot;a glass of wine a day is good for your heart&quot;.

I&#x27;m bad at reading scientific papers, could someone clarify this please? It says in the results:<p>&gt; Compared with nonconsumers, consumers of various amounts of unsweetened coffee (&gt;0 to 1.5, &gt;1.5 to 2.5, &gt;2.5 to 3.5, &gt;3.5 to 4.5, and &gt;4.5 drinks&#x2F;d) had lower risks for all-cause mortality after adjustment for lifestyle, sociodemographic, and clinical factors, with respective hazard ratios of 0.79 (95% CI, 0.70 to 0.90), 0.84 (CI, 0.74 to 0.95), 0.71 (CI, 0.62 to 0.82), 0.71 (CI, 0.60 to 0.84), and 0.77 (CI, 0.65 to 0.91); the respective estimates for consumption of sugar-sweetened coffee were 0.91 (CI, 0.78 to 1.07), 0.69 (CI, 0.57 to 0.84), 0.72 (CI, 0.57 to 0.91), 0.79 (CI, 0.60 to 1.06), and 1.05 (CI, 0.82 to 1.36).<p>It explicitly says that the all-cause mortality for unsweetened coffee was lower, that&#x27;s pretty clear. But then it just gives (Confidence Interval?) numbers for &quot;the respective estimates for consumption of sugar-sweetened coffee&quot; but doesn&#x27;t say if it lowers all-cause mortality, is that implied as well? Or are those numbers just confidence intervals without giving an assessment?

&gt; Those who drank 1.5 to 3.5 cups of coffee per day, even with a teaspoon of sugar, were up to 30 percent less likely to die during the study period than those who didn’t drink coffee. Those who drank unsweetened coffee were 16 to 21 percent less likely to die during the study period<p>Eh? So having sugar in the coffee was better than no sugar? am I reading this wrong?

&gt; Conclusion: Moderate consumption of unsweetened and sugar-sweetened coffee was associated with lower risk for death.

I&#x27;ve been a caffeine user for my whole life - started drinking energy drinks as a kid, took caffeine powder&#x2F;pills in college for studying, drank a lot of coffee at work - and I&#x27;ve stopped about a month ago.<p>I find that caffeine made me anxious, so much that all the energy wasn&#x27;t even worth it anymore, as I couldn&#x27;t focus on anything from anxiety. After stopping, my anxiety has went down so much that I feel I&#x27;m able to do much more work then before, even if I&#x27;m doing it slower, because I can just relax and focus on what I need to do, without being distracted by every single intrusive thought I have and without the crash that inevitably comes every day after caffeine wears off.<p>I don&#x27;t care about &quot;health benefits&quot; of coffee, to be honest. Caffeine is a crappy drug (for me), so nowdays I only save it for situations where I have to stay awake for longer than I usually can.

Not to criticize but... I&#x27;ve read so many (abstract of) studies on coffee and tea with such marginal conclusion on all sides that I&#x27;m pretty convinced the real state of thing is: at normal consumption level they are nor good nor bad. That&#x27;s is.

What are the differences in Cause of Death between the coffee and non-coffee drinkers?<p>For example, are coffee drinkers less likely to die in a crash commuting to work in the morning?<p>Or less likely to die from stroke?

Crazy to see that Annals of Internal Medicine prominently highlights &quot;metrics&quot; for the article including &quot;Picked up by 215 news outlets.&quot; Are academics supposed to be like Buzzfeed writers now, chasing media instead of peer citations or lasting impact in practice?

I drink anywhere between 0-5 cups of black coffee a day. By cup I mean a standard size coffee cup you&#x27;d find in any store. Sometimes I&#x27;ll throw in a cappuccino (double espresso) because I&#x27;m feeling like having one. So far I&#x27;ve lived through studies telling me I will live shorter, and studies telling me I will live longer.<p>There seems to be an unhealthy neurosis&#x2F;anxiety built up around staving off death as long as possible - the number of articles on HN, companies started around longevity by people who are, to put it bluntly, scared shitless of dying, is disturbing. You can&#x27;t lower your risk of dying. If enjoy a cup of coffee, then enjoy a damn cup of coffee regardless of what studies say.

<i>Those who drank 1.5 to 3.5 cups of coffee per day, even with a teaspoon of sugar, were up to 30 percent less likely to die during the study period than those who didn’t drink coffee.</i><p>I wish coffee studies would report results in ounces (or better, ml) instead of ambiguous &quot;cups&quot;<p>The Coffee industry uses 6 ounce cups, the USA standard &quot;cup&quot; is 8 ounces, and the imperial cup is 10 ounces (the study was based on UK data).<p>I drink around 12 oz of coffee a day and I drink it out of a single large coffee cup, is that 1 cup, 2 cups, 1.5 cups, or 1.2 cups?

Curious how well they were able to control for economic factors. How are they not sure it’s not<p>“People who can afford to buy lots of coffee can also afford other lifestyle ingredients that lead to longer life, relatively.” ?<p>Latter Day Saints and Adventists don”t drink coffee, and yet they get to brag about better than average longevity too. But that too could just be a canary for economic indicators.

Even if a real causal relation between coffee consumption and longevity was proved, I feel that the benefit of that finding would be limited as long as the actual mechanism isn’t understood. Few people who don’t like drinking coffee will start drinking it because of that, and those who like coffee drink it anyway (they’ll just feel even better doing so, maybe).

The culture around me is to drink black coffee or lattes. No added sugar or cream. Most people in my office space who seem to drink coffee as their hot beverage of choice.<p>There’s not a lot of chatter about coffee being healthy or unhealthy. The only unhealthy thing that people tend to want to avoid is being unable to sleep due to drinking too much of it or too late.<p>Another cultural thing is to joke about the first cup of joe being mandatory if you want to wake up properly (at the office). In that light it makes sense to not really consider whether it is healthy or unhealthy; it’s as if your body needs it anyway so you either gotta get it or sleepwalk through the day.

Be very critical of health studies.<p>A comment of mine got flagged because I think I hit a nerve.<p>Here&#x27;s CNN saying coffee is good for you as if it&#x27;s a new idea since 2010 on one page of search results alone,<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;duckduckgo.com&#x2F;?q=site%3Acnn.com+coffee+good+for+you" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;duckduckgo.com&#x2F;?q=site%3Acnn.com+coffee+good+for+you</a><p>Here&#x27;s Fox News saying the same thing:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;duckduckgo.com&#x2F;?q=site%253Afoxnews.com+coffee+good+for+you" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;duckduckgo.com&#x2F;?q=site%253Afoxnews.com+coffee+good+f...</a>

Mortality risk remains 100%.

&gt; Primary Funding Source:<p>&gt; National Natural Science Foundation of China<p>China&#x27;s scientific credibility went out with the window when they lied about spreading a weaponized virus a few years back.

The interesting bit here is it seems even more beneficial to add a little sugar to your coffee. It doesn’t make much sense to me, considering all the negative news about sugar in general.

I drink coffee because it became part of my routine, then I got to enjoy it, and now it helps me focus while working.<p>One aspect I notice from my caffeine intake is that it helps me deal with stuff in general--nothing stresses me out. The downside is that I also feel positive things less as well, so I try to limit it to morning&#x2F;mid-afternoon of weekdays. I can certainly see in my case living a life with less stress promoting longevity but with less richness of experience.

How do they discard confounding variables? Is there any causal link between how people drink coffee and mortality, or is this just a correlation?

The full text pdf is gated, but it&#x27;s probably indentical to this one: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;roar-assets-auto.rbl.ms&#x2F;documents&#x2F;16093&#x2F;Sweetened%20and%20Unsweetened%20Coffee.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;roar-assets-auto.rbl.ms&#x2F;documents&#x2F;16093&#x2F;Sweetened%20...</a>

I&#x27;ve cut down coffee intake by a lot, but still have a little bit.<p>For those of you that have quit completely - does the roller coaster stop? By that I mean... you have caffeine, feel productive, caffeine wears off, you feel unproductive, rinse and repeat.<p>Are you over all more productive or do the peaks and valleys just average out into nothing?

&gt; The mortality risk remained lower for people who drank both decaffeinated and caffeinated coffee.<p>Very interesting! I&#x27;ve seen this conclusion many times in the past decade+ but have yet for someone to call out the aspect of caffeine. I wouldn&#x27;t suspect caffeine to result in lower mortality risk, but you never know

What could this mean:<p>&gt; The association between artificially sweetened coffee and mortality was less consistent.<p>Also, is unsweetened coffee black coffee, or could it be coffee + some type of creamer? I’m assuming it must be the latter because if they meant black coffee they would have said that.

What if people who drink coffee get more done, people who get more done are more fulfilled, and people who are more fulfilled live longer?<p>Edit: doesn&#x27;t explain that the effect also worked with decaf. Maybe coffee contains other compounds and secondary metabolites which have health benefits

Quick Theory: The regular coffee drinkers are (on average) folks with more energy&#x2F;time&#x2F;money (which keeping up a coffee habit requires), or working (free &amp; convenient coffee at the office), or other things that correlate with better physical &amp; mental health.

I’ll have a guess at the causation here: more coffee consumed =&gt; better code written =&gt; higher income =&gt; higher standard of living, correlated with better health outcomes.

Hopefully it compensates for my increased mortality risk from beer.

People can argue about the design of the study all they want, but 170k people followed over 7 years is enough evidence for me that drinking black coffee is beneficial to my health.

Alternative interpretation: neither the coffee nor the caffeine is helpful.<p>Instead, coffee consumption is so pervasive that coffee drinkers are “normal” and many people that don’t consume coffee do so because it’s actually hurtful or uncomfortable … and that likely correlates to other weaknesses.<p>The same interpretation should be considered for all of those moderate drinking studies… I am quite certain nobody is getting a health benefit from alcohol.

Bummer, I&#x27;m in my fifties now and used to love coffee but now I just don&#x27;t really enjoy it that much. Mostly switched to tea, is there a study that tea is even better?

I&#x27;m somewhat puzzled by the &quot;lower mortality risk&quot; used without time constraints. Don&#x27;t we all have 100% mortality risk?

How many times has this been replicated? We should probably just flag science posts that haven&#x27;t been at this point.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;L5k9P" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;L5k9P</a>

I drink mostly decaf. I’m glad that the same benefits apply to decaf.

I&#x27;m invincible!

Does instant coffee count?

Amen

I dunno, call me skeptical but I think everyone has a 100% risk of dying.

On another note, I always break sugar cubes in half and even a half is sometimes too much. I don&#x27;t understand how people can drink coffee with 1 or even 2 cubes.

so why doctors keep saying to drink less coffee? not to mention sleep problems...

Stands up in muscle pose: &quot;I AM INVINCIBLE&quot;

These studies are known for excluding unhealthy people, especially those with heart conditions.<p>Edit: by &quot;these studies&quot;, I mean caffeine, cigarettes&#x2F;smoking, alcohol, coffee and generally any food or &quot;health&quot; study. If you don&#x27;t know the exact make up of the test group, then I just assume it&#x27;s rigged to get a certain result.

Black coffee, even with a teaspoon or sugar has to be better than soda or the sugary monstrosities from Starbucks that are excluded from the study. One can of coke contains 39g (~7 teaspoons) of sugar. This study seems to be less about the benefits of coffee but rather the health risks of sugar.

I didn&#x27;t take up coffee drinking until my late-20&#x27;s. At first I took my coffee black, then I read how caffeine boosts the metabolism. This draws down sugar from the blood. To avoid a cortisol response, it&#x27;s best to complement the caffeine in coffee with sugar.<p>This study seems to confirm that fake sugar is harmful. I have family who drink fake-sugar cola products - these don&#x27;t help their weight. I&#x27;ve seen one person fall apart &#x27;mentally&#x27; within 1&#x2F;2 hour of drinking an electrolyte beverage made with sucralose and other fake sugar.<p>Ideally glucose is consumed with potassium, to avoid insulin release: milk, orange juice, potatoes, etc... Fructose does not stimulate the release of insulin.