Coffee: One Sugar Please

I have a strong relationship with coffee. I began drinking coffee when my mother put coffee in a bottle with a little sugar for me when I was a toddler. These days, a mother would get reprimanded by somebody if she did such a thing, but in the 1950s there weren’t the variety of drinks for children that are available today; milk, orange juice, and Kool-Aid, that was about it.

When I talk about coffee now, I don’t mean the fancy kind with steamed milk and espresso and other ingredients. I drink strong coffee, eight to ten ounces per mug, with exactly one teaspoon of sugar. I drink only Sumatra roast and use a Turkish grind, which is more like powder than grounds; I get the most flavor out of the beans when I brew it that way. I sit back and drink it, savoring every sip. (And yet somehow I married a woman who thinks the only thing coffee is good for is dipping a biscotti.)

The benefits of coffee have been established in prior studies of coffee drinkers compared to non-coffee drinkers. Coffee seems to reduce mortality from cardiovascular disease and cancer. No one seemed to separate the drinkers who used sweeteners from those who didn’t, and that’s why a recently published study caught my attention.

Researchers examined data from over 170,000 subjects in the U.K. Biobank Study; their purpose was to see if adding sweeteners to coffee, either sugar or artificial sweeteners, impacted the mortality of the subjects. I won’t make you wait until Saturday: the coffee sweetened with sugar had the same reduction in mortality as the unsweetened coffee. What about artificial sweeteners? I’ll talk about those on Saturday.

What are you prepared to do today?

        Dr. Chet

Reference: Ann Internal Med. 2022. https://doi.org/10.7326/M21-2977