In a new study, moderate coffee consumption was linked to a lower risk of death. However, scientists caution that there are still many unknown factors.
However, there are still significant constraints that make it impossible to say whether or not drinking coffee reduces the risk of death.
In an accompanying editorial, Christina Wee, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and a deputy editor of the journal, stated that the study attempted to control for other factors such as socioeconomic status.
Yet, she cautioned that attempts to isolate the effects of coffee consumption alone are not ideal.
“Nonetheless, the decision whether to consume coffee (and whether to add sugar) is not a random event and is influenced by difficult-to-measure factors, including occupation and work demands and hours, socioeconomic and emotional stressors, the availability of leisure time, and intolerance to coffee from uncaptured health or clinical reasons, to name just a few,” she wrote.
She said that a safer assumption is that coffee drinkers do not need to stop for health reasons.
“Although we cannot definitively conclude that drinking coffee reduces mortality risk, the totality of the evidence does not suggest a need for most coffee drinkers—particularly those who drink it with no or modest amounts of sugar—to eliminate coffee,” she wrote. “So drink up—but it would be prudent to avoid too many caramel macchiatos while more evidence brews.”
“Of note, many of the observed associations (including our findings) between high coffee consumption and morbidity and mortality are present with caffeinated as well as decaffeinated coffee, and thus it seems unlikely that caffeine alone can explain all potential health effects of coffee,” they write.
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