Does Coffee Increase Lifespan? The Problem with Observational Studies

Some institutions have a lot of clout. That means information coming from those institutions gets clout too. So we feel especially disappointed when these cloudy institutions spread health information that can be called suspect at best. Especially when it's about coffee. And that's the topic of this week's Healthcare Today. Another one, as DJ Khaled would say. A study published in May 2022 analyzed coffee consumption and mortality and, this time around, reported lower risk of death for coffee drinkers. Harvard Health, with all their Harvard-related clout, published a quick story on this study saying coffee could significantly lower your risk of dying within the next few years. It's gotta be true, right? Harvard Health would never mislead us. But let's just take a look and see. The researchers from this study in question gathered data on consumption of sugar-sweetened, artificially sweetened, and unsweetened coffee in over 171,000 people, and then followed them for a median of seven years to see who died. Because, what? Beyond coffee drinking could possibly have anything to do with these people dying. Their conclusion? Moderate consumption of unsweetened and sugar-sweetened coffee was associated with lower risk of death. So that's it, people. We've discovered the secret to not dying young. Just drink coffee. Who would know it was this simple all this time? Oh, wait, unless drinking coffee gives you cancer? Wasn't that the result of the last study we saw about this? Come on! We've done at least a couple videos on this, and so have others. But the studies keep on coming, and the results are good or bad depending on the day, and the headlines spread like wildfire without any real context. So we end up with a lot of people who believe that coffee will save you, and a lot of people who think that coffee will kill you. When are we going to stop publicizing these studies? Better yet, when are we going to stop conducting these studies? There's no more value to be had with studies like these. I repeat, no value. But sorry, we're acting like you've seen all our videos on the topic before. Let's do a recap to remind ourselves why there's no value. This was an observational study. We looked at a bunch of people, collected data about one thing they were doing, and then reported that there was an association between that thing and them dying early or not. People eat all kinds of things and do all kinds of things that affect their health. These people differ in all kinds of ways, like whether they eat processed foods or whether they exercise, etc., etc., etc. And yes, studies try to control for these factors, but we simply can't adequately control for the number of relevant factors involved. And we can't forget, of course, that these data are self-reported, generally at only one time point. Self-reports aren't reliable, and people's coffee drinking patterns don't just stay consistent over years of their lifetime. To be fair, at the very end of the Harvard Health article, it mentions that the study couldn't prove coffee drinking caused people to live longer. But why is this, the actual most important point of all of this, buried at the bottom? Observational studies are important, but observational studies on things like coffee and death have been done to, well, death. And any valuable information we can get from them has been gotten. We don't need any more of them. And we don't need any more media coverage of them, particularly from institutions who hold a lot of public trust, dear their name alone. Hey, if you enjoyed this video, you might enjoy this previous video on how the acrylamide in coffee won't give you cancer. We'd really like it if you'd like the video down below, and subscribe to the channel, and maybe go to patreon.com slash healthcare triage, help support the show, make it bigger and better. We'd especially like to thank our research associates, James Glasgow, Joe Sivitz, Edward Lilleholm, and Brian Nam, and of course, our Surgeon Emerald, Sam.