How have artificial sweeteners affected life expectancy?
According to the data, people who regularly drank unsweetened coffee were up to 29% less likely to die during the study than their peers who did not drink coffee while sweetened coffee was associated with a 31% lower risk. “Previous observational studies have linked coffee to reducing the risk of death, but they did not distinguish between coffee consumed with sugar or artificial sweeteners and coffee consumed without,” the researchers wrote in a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
55.4% of participants drank coffee without any sweetener, 14.3% drank coffee with sugar, 6.1% drank coffee with artificial sweetener, and 24.2% did not drink coffee at all. Coffee drinkers were sorted into additional groups based on the amount of coffee cups they drank per day. The study did not examine whether participants added milk or what type of coffee they drank – two factors that could skew the results. In addition, people who drank coffee with artificial sweeteners did not live significantly longer than those who did not drink coffee at all.
“Consumption of artificially sweetened coffee was much lower than that of unsweetened and sugar-sweetened coffee, which reduces the power to detect any connection,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Chen Mao, an epidemiologist, who warned that milk and other sugars in takeaway drinks – Or drinking more than 4.5 cups of sweetened coffee daily – may erase the benefits found.