Good news for coffee purists—taking your joe black is associated with a reduced risk of death from all causes.
This is the conclusion of a new study out of Tufts University, which found that this apparent benefit of coffee vanishes as cream, milk and sugar are added.
“Coffee is among the most-consumed beverages in the world,” said paper author and epidemiologist Fang Fang Zhang in a statement.
“With nearly half of American adults reporting drinking at least one cup per day, it is important for us to know what it might mean for health.”
“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.”
In their study, Zhang and colleagues analyzed health and diet data on a nationally-representative sample of 46,000 adults collected between 1999 and 2018.
They linked this dataset to mortality data from the National Death Index to explore how different ways of taking one’s coffee might affect one’s risk of an early death.
Specifically, the team categorized coffee consumption based on whether the drink was caffeinated or decaffeinated; taken with or without various forms of sugar; and whether it was drunk with or without milk, cream or half-and-half.
The researchers also looked at how much sugar or saturated fats, respectively, were added to the subjects’ coffee—with low added sugar (whether as granulated sugar, honey or syrup) and saturated fats being each classified as under 5 percent of the Daily Value.
So, for example, this would be less than half a teaspoon of sugar and either give tablespoons of 2 percent milk or one tablespoon of either cream or half-and-half.
The analyses indicated that consumption of at least one cup of caffeinated coffee per day was associated with a 16 percent lower risk of all-cause mortality—a figure that rose to 17 percent when 2–3 cups were consumed daily.
Drinking more beyond this was not linked to further increases—in fact, drinking more than three cups a day appeared to weaken the benefit as concerned death from cardiovascular disease in particular.
Moreover, the team found that the apparent health benefits of coffee were diminished when things were added to coffee.
All-in-all, drinking black coffee and coffee with low levels of added sugar and saturated fat was associated with a 14 percent reduction in the risk of all-cause mortality, as compared to those people who didn’t drink coffee. But that same link was not observed for coffee with high amounts of either added sugar or saturated fat.
Paper author and nutrition epidemiologist Bingjie Zhou added: “Our results align with the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which recommend limiting added sugar and saturated fat.”
Although the findings are likely to delight regular coffee drinkers, the study has some limitations—including how the data was based on people self-reporting how much coffee they drank, as well as how they took it.
The team also noted that they did not find an association between the drinking of decaffeinated coffee and the risk of an early death—but cautioned that such might just be an artefact of how few of the subjects drank decaf.
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Reference
Zhou, B., Ruan, M., Pan, Y., Wang, L., & Zhang, F. F. (2025). Coffee Consumption and Mortality among United States Adults: A Prospective Cohort Study. The Journal of Nutrition. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tjnut.2025.05.004
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