coffee

Look, Coffee Is Probably Not Bad for You

Every so often, a bleary-eyed friend tells me they’ve quit coffee. My response to this is always the same: Why? Because my long-held hunch — based on many years of following this stuff as a health and science writer — has been that coffee is probably not bad for you, and may even be quite good for you, a theory now backed by a recent video post from Dr. Aaron E. Carroll, a professor of pediatrics at the Indiana University School of Medicine. Carroll combs through an impressive amount of high-quality data and finds almost no evidence that even the more enthusiastic coffee drinkers among us — those who down five or six or even seven cups a day — are risking their health for their favored vice. 

Coffee consumption, in fact, probably shouldn’t even be considered a vice, says Carroll, though he notes that it’s the stuff we put in our coffee — sugar and flavored syrup and the like — that turns it into liquid candy. “It’s way past time that we stopped viewing coffee itself as something we need to cut back on,” he concludes. So noted. 

Look, Coffee Is Probably Not Bad for You