Here’s what’s on the healthspan menu today:
- Drinking Sweetened Coffee May Increase Lifespan
- Why do women have lower alcohol tolerance than men?
Drinking Sweetened Coffee May Increase Lifespan
If you follow health news long enough, you’ll see similar news stories pop up again and again.
This is another story about how coffee may increase longevity.
Here are the key points:
- Both sweetened (1 teaspoon of sugar on average) and unsweetened coffee drinkers were linked to a lower risk of death
- Surprisingly, sweetened coffee drinkers were less likely to die (31%) compared to unsweetened drinkers (21%)
- The effect was strongest in drinkers with moderate coffee consumption, defined as 1.5 to 3.5 cups daily
- They did also track those who used artificial sweeteners in their coffee, but those results were inconclusive
- This was an observational study done by researchers at Southern Medical University in Guangzhou, China
- The data they used came from the UK Biobank, where they observed 171,616 people who didn’t have cardiovascular disease or cancer at the start of the study. The average age was 55.6 years and they were followed from 2009 to 2018
You can categorize this research as another win for coffee drinkers. An even better win for those who like to add sugar to your coffee. Just remember no more than a teaspoon!
As for me, I’m still drinking my coffee black.
Why do women have lower alcohol tolerance than men?
I came across this interesting Instagram post by Dr. Peter Attia on why women have lower alcohol tolerance than men.
This was a fact I was already aware of, but I always thought the reason why was simply because men are bigger than women so they can process more alcohol.
However, Attia breaks it down nicely:
- The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcohol defines heavy drinking for men as more than 14 drinks per week. For women, it is more than 7 drinks per week
- If body weight alone explains the difference then you’d expect the average woman to be half the size of the average man, but that isn’t the case
- It’s not weight, but total body water content that contributes to men’s better tolerance for alcohol as on average men have more water content than women of the same height and weight
- Most important, though, is men and women have different rates of alcohol metabolism where women absorb a higher quantity of alcohol for a set amount
- This means women will have a higher blood alcohol concentration than men after drinking the same amount of alcohol
- This means women are more at risk for greater health consequences than men when consuming alcohol
This is a bummer for you female alcohol drinkers out there. However, there’s always coffee!
