5 Awesome Illinois Coffee Shops Where Daily Sips Will Extend Your Life

There's something special going on in these places. Want to live a longer and sweeter life, you need to be drinking coffee from these places.

Important Message from the 'Coffee Experts'

I'll start by divulging who the 'experts' are that I'm really loving today. I am a daily coffee drinker and the 'experts' that are giving me a stamp of approval on my daily sips punch card is a group of researchers from China. The results of their 7-year study on daily coffee drinking bring us to this wonderful moment today.

Over the course of seven years, according to insider.com, the researchers studied the coffee habits and health of more than 171,000 UK residents who didn't have cancer or heart disease at the start of the study. Since proving that daily coffee drinking will extend your life has already been suggested in previous research, the researchers in China wanted to see if the same would be true even if you add sugar to your coffee.

Good News for Fans of Sweetened Coffee

Study participants who drank between one and four cups of lightly sweetened coffee per day were 29 to 31% less likely to die during the study, according to the data.

There was quite a bit of data collected over the course of this 7-year study, and I encourage you to take a closer look, to find the perfect center to your coffee-lovin' universe. Hey. we're all different, so I don't want you to take this information I'm sharing right now and just run with one fact, especially if your health is a concern. I'm grateful you are here reading this and I want you to live a very long life too, so the Annals of Internal Medicine is where you'll find everything the researchers learned from the study.

Let's just work with the information that most benefits us for this conversation about our sweet, sweet coffee favorites. Our daily coffee loves us so much that it helps us live a longer life, even if we add sugar.

If you're wondering where some of the Rockford area's best cups of lightly (and heavily) sweetened coffee drinks can be found, here are five of the most popular.

5 Awesome Illinois Coffee Shops Where Daily Sips Will Extend Your Life

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Velvet Robot Coffee Lab | 116 N. Madison St.

This first place sweetens a cup of coffee like no other.

The Fruity Pebbles Cold Brew

This next drink will blow your Fall-loving mind. Pumpkin and Cinnamon Toast Crunch

Sometimes it is really hard to tell if Velvet Robot is a coffee shop or a place to go for dessert and they just happen to put some caffeine underneath your slice of raspberry cheesecake.

Cleary, the 'sweetened coffee extends your life' researchers aren't endorsing this kind of sugary coffee as a way to extend your life but if you're going to be living longer, you might as well live a little and treat yourself.

Wired Cafe 414 E. State St.

Next up, is Wired Cafe. Great coffee, amazing sandwiches and wraps, and very tasty sweetened coffee drinks.

Wired is so cool they even made up a brand new verb to describe a Pride Month drink that I will be using often.

Whipped cream latte which you can 'festify' with rainbow marshmallows.

Meg's Daily Grind | 1141 N Alpine Rd and 3879 N Perryville Rd

For over 20 years, Meg's has served my favorite white chocolate mocha in town.

The chocolate and peanut butter latte

YES, PLEASE!

Mix some vanilla and cinnamon, then a little something extra from some neighborhood bees and you get,

The Honey Comb

Besides the locations on Perryville & Alpine roads, you'll also find Meg's at events all over the Rockford area, in their huge coffee truck.

Vintage Goose Cafe

This is the newest coffee spot in Rockford, but you won't find a brick and mortar, this sweet operation is run out of a rfully restored 1964 Airstream trailer.

Meet the mobile barista food truck

I'll bet you can taste this next video from Vintage Goose.

Check out more of the Vintage Goose story

Rockford Roasting Co. | 206 N. Main St. & Rockford's Embassy Suites on Rock River

I'll take a maple bacon donut and whatever is in that cup below.

You have to love a coffee drink that looks at fantastic as it tastes.

Whoa! Blackberry (Bam-Ba-Lam)

Some barista's brains just operate on a different level than the rest of us. This life-extending sweetened coffee drink is made with espresso, vegan butterscotch, blackberry and purple sweet potato cold foam.

Now get out and go sippin' and livin'.