The reason why adding sugar to your coffee could make you live longer

If you're a coffee drinker, we have good news for you.

A recent study from researchers at Southern Medical University in Guangzhou, China, found that people who drink coffee either unsweetened or with minimal sweetener are at less of a risk of dying compared to non-coffee drinkers.

Published in the Annal of Internal Medicine, the study took 171,616 participants from the UK and studied their caffeine habits for nine years to see how drinking coffee had impacted their health.

Findings indicated those who moderately drank coffee without sweetener were 16 to 21 percent less likely to die than those who do not consume coffee.

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Those who drank lightly sweetened coffee (an average of one teaspoon) with natural sweeteners were 29 to 31 per cent less likely to die.

The findings echo similar ones from researchers at JAMA Internal Medicinewho found that people who drank two cups of coffee per day lived longer than those who did not.

Findings were inconclusive for people who use artificial sweeteners.

In the study, to measure the impact on health, researchers used participants who had no underlying cardiovascular or cancer-related issues at the beginning of the experiment and then tracked their health over the nine-year period.

While drinking a cup of coffee with minimal natural sweetener was found to be not harmful, other researchers have warned consumers to avoid drinking sugar-heavy caffeinated beverages.

Consuming too much sugar can lead to long-term health effects like higher blood pressure, inflammation, weight gain, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, fatty liver disease, stroke, and more.

One doctor also suggests drinking your morning coffee mid-morning rather than when you first wake up to maximize the effects of your caffeine.

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