https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2023/04/19/health/coffee-tea-lower-mortality-type-2-diabetes-wellness/index.html

If you have type 2 diabetes, drinking more coffee, tea or plain water may lower your risk of dying prematurely from any cause by about 25%, a new study found.

However, drinking more sugar-sweetened beverages raised the risk of heart disease by 25% and the risk of dying from a heart attack or another cardiovascular event by 29%, the study said. Research has shown cardiovascular disease is the most common cause of death for people with type 2 diabetes.

“Certain beverages are absolutely more beneficial than others, depending on which type of beverage you’re comparing,” said study author Qi Sun, an associate professor of nutrition and epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston.


“Based on our study I would rank black coffee, unsweetened tea and plain water higher than low-fat milk, fruit juice or artificially sweetened beverages,” he said. “Sugar-sweetened beverages like colas, fruit juices that are high in sugar and whole fat milk that’s high in saturated fat are known risk factors for developing type 2 diabetes and premature cardiovascular disease.”

El Gato is constitutionally incapable of reporting anything straight. He always sensationalizes the story, distorting it, usually badly, in the process.

Let me try to explain the problem with his claim in terms even a Gato can grasp

True, the article does say that the statistics the researchers came up with gave a 26% lower risk of premature death for coffee drinkers, and 23% for water drinkers. Tea came in at 21%.

Two things - 1) These are such close percentages for what is actually a rather small effect, that the difference is almost certainly "down in the noise", which is to say, it is not statistically significant. Claims that regularly see-saw back and forth fall into this category - eggs are good/bad for you is a good example. As long as you eat eggs in moderate amounts, they have no noticeable effect on your life expectancy. A very tiny change in the data can switch the "answer" from good to bad or vice versa.

2), and this is the more important one, statisticians need to correct for biases in the data, and it is surprising how often this is not done, usually because that requires collecting additional information, which costs money, or it requires throwing out some of the data, which means additional subjects need to be added to the study, which also costs money. And sometimes it just doesn't occur to them that the data has a bias in it.

In this case, people who drank primarily coffee had a slightly longer life expectancy than people who drank primarily water. There is some probability that those two percentages are actually identical for practical purposes. The article did not give confidence limits and error bars on the statistical tests, so we really can't attach probabilities to the significance of that reported difference. Based on my own experience, limited though it is, the 3% difference is likely not significant at all.

And here is the real kicker - if someone drinks water in preference to coffee, for some percentage of people in that category, they do not drink coffee because they have health problems that prevent them from drinking coffee. [I can't think of any health conditions that would preclude dinking water, but coffee would be OK]

So the people with health conditions that preclude drinking coffee, are, at least in some cases, more likely to die prematurely than people who can drink coffee.

And bingo, that biases the data. The people who had to drink water in preference to coffee because of a medical condition didn't die because they drank water. They drank water because they had a medical condition which also shortened their life.


I'd bet a major portion of the farm that these authors did not track chronic medical conditions and correlate them with whether a person drank coffee or water.

TL;DR
Coffee and tea are not better for you than drinking water. And even using the authors' stats, tea was worse than water, so no matter how you interpret the article, El Gato misreported it.

I recently posted about a very similar bias that was found in the Metropolitan Life height-weight charts back around 1970.

https://www.exmormon.org/phorum/read.php?2,2474767,2474990#msg-2474990

And I just looked up an NIH article that gives a detailed explanation of that event. Apparently it happened in the late 1970s, so my memory is a little hazy.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3953878/
ETA: this paper deals more with overweight than underweight data bias. There were apparently a number of biases in those charts that were analyzed in the 1970s and 80s.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 05/13/2023 02:34PM by Brother Of Jerry.

The original article supports your analysis

https://www.bmj.com/content/381/bmj-2022-073406

The error bars show significant overlap (see figures). It appears that coffee may provide a slight advantage for cardiovascular disease incidence, but water seems to be slightly better at reducing cardiovascular disease mortality. There doesn't appear to be any significant difference between the three on all cause mortality.

"the pooled hazard ratios for all cause mortality were 1.20 (95% confidence interval 1.04 to 1.37) for sugar sweetened beverages (SSBs), 0.96 (0.86 to 1.07) for artificially sweetened beverages (ASBs), 0.98 (0.90 to 1.06) for fruit juice, 0.74 (0.63 to 0.86) for coffee, 0.79 (0.71 to 0.89) for tea, 0.77 (0.70 to 0.85) for plain water, 0.88 (0.80 to 0.96) for low fat milk, and 1.20 (0.99 to 1.44) for full fat milk."


Also see the section titled Strengths and limitations of this study

Ah, thanks.

Her response began, "Well, I don't hate you..."  At this point, I stopped listening.

'Not listening' can be a source of tremendous peace, comfort, and support.

Sounds like a bit of dialogue from "Guardians of the Galaxy", or maybe Billy Crystal.

No matter the argument, coffee and tea have never been found by nutritionists to be bad for one's health, and all the arguments raised in priesthood meetings and Sunday school to defend the WoW are just so much absurd claptrap.

What better way to start the day than with a fresh coffee or a brew? And what better way to have a mid-morning snack or elevenses than with tea? That's the real argument.

Joey hit a Home Run regarding tobacco even if some other contemporaries were somewhat aware, he brought it into focus when it was an important industry at the time and also kept slaves 'employed'.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/14/2023 02:45PM by GNPE.

I think the "slaves" would have been perfectly happy seeking the employment of their choice in the country of their choice. Any industry that sustained the institution of slavery, by contrast, was evil from start to finish.

the news items, scientific & others regarding claimed & disputed benefits or health problems of coffee/tea are the Neverending Story of LDS lore, I seriously doubt that these could or will ever be definitively resolved.