A MASSIVE NEW STUDY SAYS THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS TO PEOPLE WHO DRINK BLACK COFFEE EVERY DAY

It’s one of the most-consumed drinks the world, so it’s good to know what it’s doing to us.

Another day, another coffee study — and this time it’s good news for anyone who drinks coffee daily, and who skips the cream and sugar.

Writing in The Journal of Nutrition, researchers from Tufts University said they looked at the coffee-drinking habits of 46,332 Americans between 1999 and 2018, when they were part of the U.S. government’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.

They had three big findings:

• First, drinking one cup of coffee per day was linked to a 16% lower risk of death for any of the participants over the study period, from any cause.
• Next, drinking more coffee was linked to an even slightly better result; for example, study participants who drank 2-3 cups per day had a 17% lower risk of “all-cause mortality.”
• Finally, the benefit only applied to black coffee.

Adding cream or anything beyond a very small amount of sugar resulted in study participants having the same all-cause mortality rate as people who drank no coffee at all.

It also applied only to caffeinated coffee — although the researchers pointed out that there might simply not be a large enough sample size of people among the 46,332 people who actually drank decaf habitually.

“Coffee is among the most-consumed beverages in the world, and with nearly half of American adults reporting drinking at least one cup per day, it’s important for us to know what it might mean for health,” said Fang Fang Zhang, senior author of the study. “The health benefits of coffee might be attributable to its bioactive compounds, but our results suggest that the addition of sugar and saturated fat may reduce the mortality benefits.”

As always, we have to point out that this study just shows a correlation between drinking coffee and a lower risk of mortality; it doesn’t necessarily mean that coffee itself causes lower risk.

However, it’s in line with quite a few other studies that suggest drinking coffee leads to longer life, statistically speaking — or at least, less risk of death from any cause during the study period.

A few examples:

• A 2018 study, entitled “Association of Coffee Drinking With Mortality by Genetic Variation in Caffeine Metabolism,” found that drinking coffee during a 10-year study period led to between 10% and 15% less likelihood of all-cause mortality.
• Another study took the “drink even more coffee” benefits to an extreme, suggesting that people who drank “at least four cups of coffee per day” had a 64% lower risk of “all-cause mortality than those who never or almost never consumed coffee.”
• And, a 2022 study of 171,616 people in the U.K. found that drinking between 1.5 and 3.5 cups of coffee daily was linked to a 30% reduced chance of dying from any cause during the seven-year study period.

Oh, and it was just last week that we learned about a Harvard study that focused on women who drank coffee daily over decades, from 1984 to 2016 — and found that the ones who drank coffee were much more likely to be mentally sharp, strong, and healthy as they age past 70.

Once more, we find that a habit that so many people enjoy and would consider a guilty pleasure if it wasn’t good for us, actually has health benefits.

How often do we get to read news like that? Feel free to pour yourself another cup, and reflect on it today

This post originally appeared at inc.com.

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2025-06-22T12:30:54Z