Study: Coffee a better choice than smoothies
By Michael Mosley, BBC News
Which is healthier – coffee or smoothies?
It seems obvious that the answer must be a smoothie. After all, drinking coffee is a necessary evil while having a smoothie, made from fruit, is part of your five-a-day. But when you look into the scientific studies they reveal something much more surprising. Let’s start with coffee.
There have been numerous claims down the years that drinking coffee will increase your risk of a whole range of terrible things from heart disease to cancer.
These claims have been largely based on case control studies, where you take a group of people who drink coffee and compare them with another matched group who don’t.
The problem with this approach is that coffee drinkers are more likely than non-coffee drinkers to have other “bad” habits, like drinking alcohol or smoking, so it is hard to tease apart what is really doing the harm.
A more reliable way to get at the truth is to do what is called a prospective cohort study. You take a group of disease-free individuals, collect data about them, then follow them for a large number of years to see what happens.