Coffee drinkers live longer, especially if they add a spoonful of sugar

studyfinds.org

4 points·Vaslo··3 comments

Is this meaningful or just a deceptive statistic? Are the people who are not adding sugar abstaining because they have diabetes? Because they're trying to lose weight? Do younger demographics have a sweet tooth? Do older generations drink black coffee? Do black coffee people drink more coffee than those who don't like the taste? Et cetera.

The study: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M21-2977

As the study notes, they controlled for at least some of these:

> lower risks for all-cause mortality after adjustment for lifestyle, sociodemographic, and clinical factors

"clinical factors" would include diagnosed diabetes or anything else available from a medical record. "lifestyle" includes actual weight, though presumably not intent.

The data they used came from UK Biobank ("Baseline demographic, lifestyle, and dietary data from the UK Biobank"), which is quite complete: https://www.ukbiobank.ac.uk/

Of course, they can't control for everything, but they can control for a lot of the first 20 or 30 things someone would think of… and that probably includes everything you listed.

They adjusted the hazard ratios to remove the effect of diabetes. Would this not skew the data when they are not included in the sugar cohort? The confounding variables I'm talking about are behavioral, not clinical.

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