Skip Main Navigation outline goes here The Lancet, Volume 361,
Issue 9358, Page 703, 22 February 2003
doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(03)12584-6Cite or Link Using DOI  Coffee
consumption and risk of type 2 diabetes mellitus  Authors' reply
Sir—Daniel Tan suggests that additives to coffee (milk and
sugar) could have pathogenic effects, and may have confounded
the association between coffee consumption and risk of type 2
diabetes in our study. This type of confounding—ie, harmful
factors associated with coffee consumption— cannot explain the
observed inverse association between coffee consumption and type
2 diabetes. We examined whether findings were different for
coffee with added sugar or milk. Exclusion of coffee drinkers
who did not regularly add sugar to their coffee (coffee
abstainers and those drinking coffee with sugar remained) did
not change our findings: people who drank at least seven cups of
coffee a day were 0·50 (95% CI 0·27—0·93) as likely as those who
drank two cups or fewer a day to develop type 2 diab