Any kind of coffee you want ...

... as long as you want it black.

Another day, another coffee study. This time it’s good news for anyone who drinks coffee daily, and who skips the cream and sugar.

Writing in The Journal of Nutrition, researchers from Tufts University said they looked at the coffee-drinking habits of 46,332 Americans between 1999 and 2018, when they were part of the U.S. government’s National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.

They had three big findings:

1. First, drinking one cup of coffee per day was linked to a 16% lower risk of death for any of the participants over the study period, from any cause.

2. Next, drinking more coffee was linked to an even slightly better result; for example, study participants who drank 2-3 cups per day had a 17% lower risk of “all-cause mortality.”

3. Finally, the benefit only applied to black coffee.

Adding cream or anything beyond a very small amount of sugar resulted in study participants having the same all-cause mortality rate as people who drank no coffee at all.

It also applied only to caffeinated coffee — although the researchers pointed out that there might simply not be a large enough sample size of people among the 46,332 people who actually drank decaf habitually.

“Coffee is among the most-consumed beverages in the world, and with nearly half of American adults reporting drinking at least one cup per day, it’s important for us to know what it might mean for health,” said Fang Fang Zhang, senior author of the study. “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.”

As always, we have to point out that this study just shows a correlation between drinking coffee and a lower risk of mortality; it doesn’t necessarily mean that coffee itself causes lower risk.

However, it’s in line with quite a few other studies that suggest drinking coffee leads to longer life, statistically speaking — or at least, less risk of death from any cause during the study period.

Oh, and it was just last month that we learned about a Harvard study that focused on women who drank coffee daily over decades, from 1984 to 2016 — and found that the ones who drank coffee were much more likely to be mentally sharp, strong, and healthy as they age past 70.

Once more, we find that a habit that so many people enjoy and would consider a guilty pleasure if it wasn’t good for us, actually has health benefits.

How often do we get to read news like that?

Feel free to pour yourself another cup, and reflect on it today.

---

7 other things worth mentioning

• MAGA is recoiling at President Trump's increasingly personal attacks on his own followers over Jeffrey Epstein, opening the most bitter divisions yet between the president and the GOP base. As one MAGAworld operative put it: "Villainizing your base for caring about the thing you told them to care about is never a good strategy." (Axios)

• The United States sent five immigrants it says were convicted of serious crimes to the African nation of Eswatini, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said — an expansion of the Trump administration’s largely secretive third-country deportation program. The Eswatini government said Wednesday the men, which it referred to as “prisoners” and “inmates,” were being held in isolated units in unnamed correctional facilities in Eswatini but were considered to be in transit and would ultimately be sent back to their home countries. (AP)

• A U.S. citizen who helped the Kremlin target Ukrainian troops has been granted a Russian passport in Moscow. Daniel Martindale, with a trim beard and dressed in a suit and tie, smiled as he received his new documents, as seen during a Russian state television broadcast a report on Tuesday. In 2022, Martindale entered Ukraine just days before President Vladimir Putin ordered thousands of troops into Ukraine. He established contact with pro-Russian forces via Telegram and passed them information on Ukrainian military facilities from the Donetsk region in the country's east. (The Independent)

• Education Secretary Linda McMahon is expected to move quickly now that the Supreme Court has cleared the way for the Trump administration to continue unwinding her department. Now, Trump and McMahon are free to execute the layoffs and break up the department’s work among other federal agencies. Among the most important decisions is where to put management of federal student loans, a $1.6 trillion portfolio affecting nearly 43 million borrowers. (AP)

• Police in Thailand arrested a woman Tuesday who allegedly enticed a string of Buddhist monks into sexual relationships and then pressured them into making large payments to cover up their intimacy. The possible violation of the celibacy rule for monks has rocked Buddhist institutions and gripped public attention in Thailand in recent weeks. At least nine abbots and senior monks involved in the scandal have been disrobed and cast out of the monkhood, the Royal Thai Police Central Investigation Bureau said. (CBS News)

• A legendary ship vanished with $138 million in treasure. Two explorers say they found it. (Popular Mechanics)

• Sorry, yinz. Fuhgeddaboudit, you guys: In the past 20 years or so, "y'all" has gone from being a Southernism to become America's favorite way to use the second person plural, according to linguists. "Y'all has won," says Paul E. Reed, a linguist at the University of Alabama who studies Southern American English and Appalachian English. "It's expanded much more outside of the South" and especially among people who are under 40 years old, he says. (NPR)

---

Thanks for reading. Photo by Brent Ninaber on Unsplash. I wrote about some of this before at Inc.com. See you in the comments.