What are confounding factors?
Researchers may say that their results have been affected by “confounding factors”. There are many aspects of lifestyle and diet (such as smoking, diet, age, sex, sedentary lifestyle as examples), which can affect your health. These results should be taken into account when looking at the potential effects of coffee on health, and are known as “confounding factors”. It can be very difficult to control for these when analysing the results of epidemiological research, and they can potentially cause false-positive results for coffee. Most researchers stress that their results on coffee may be affected by not having controlled for these factors.
