The Case for Drinking as Much Coffee as You Like

Now what do you expect from a coffee company dude, "the case for drinking as little coffee as you like?"  Not gonna happen here!!!!

Was looking at the internet and found yet another article on the glowing benefits of coffee!  You know I would be remiss to let that pass without passing it along...don't you think?  It was written by Lindsey Abrams and, a must read here on the first  day of November 2013...

I will take a few liberties and shorten the piece so that you will have time to take time to brew a pot of The Alpaca Bean Coffee...have to do that 'cause you are gonna get so excited you will want to get into the game and start improving your health right away.  You know, it is like when you were a kid watching your favorite football team, halftime rolled around and you just had to get outside and throw a few passes with your bro...oh, I reckon that was a guy thing...sorry just got carried away! :o)

Now for the rest of the story:

"What I tell patients is, if you like coffee, go ahead and drink as much as you want and can." Says Dr. Peter Martin, Director of the Institute for Coffee Studies at Vanderbilt University.  He's even developed a metric for monitoring your dosage:  If you are having trouble sleeping, cut back on your last cup of the day.  From there, he says, "If you drink that much, it's not going to do you any harm, and it might actually help you...A Lot."

Officially, the American Medical Association recommends conservatively that "moderate tea or coffee drinking likely has no negative effect on health, as long as you live an otherwise healthy lifestyle."  That is a lackluster endorsement, in light of so much recent glowing research.  Not only have most of coffee's purported ill effects been disproven--the most recent review fails to link it to the development of hypertension--but we have so, so much information about its benefits. We believe they extend from preventing Alzheimer's disease to protecting the liver.  What we know goes beyond small-scale studies or limited observations.  The past couple of years have seen findings, that taken together, suggest that we should embrace coffee for reasons beyond the benefits of caffeine, and that we might go so far as to consider it a nutrient.

Now, I must say that Ms. Abrams is saying what I want to hear...however, I am caught in the middle here...on the one side I want you to get excited about the benefits of coffee drinking...but, on the other, I cannot but help cautioning some of you that drinking too much of a good thing, like The Alpaca Bean Coffee, could jingle and jangle your nerves if you are of a nature to get jingled and jangled...if you know what I mean.

But to continue...

That there were no major differences in risk reduction between regular and decaf coffee suggest there's something in it, aside from its caffeine content, that could be contributing to these observed benefits.  It also demonstrates that caffeine was in no way mitigating coffee's therapeutic effects.  Of course, what we choose to add to coffee can just as easily negate the benefits--various sugar-sweetened beverages were all significantly associated with an increased risk of diabetes.  A learned taste for cream and sugar (made all the more enticing  when they're designed to smell like seasonal celebrations) is likely one of the reasons why we associate coffee more with decadence than prudence.

 I continue to fast forward since this is a newsletter and not a med book...here are the final words of Ms. Abrams on this subject:

Nothing can be all good, and there is still information working against coffee--in October, The Atlantic reported on a study from the health professionals cohort that suggested a link between excessive coffee consumption and glaucoma.  "The current recommendation is that if somebody's not drinking coffee, you don't tell them to start, said Dr. Bhupathiraju.  But she agrees that drinking coffee, and more of it, does appear to be beneficial.  The evidence remains overwhelmingly in coffee's favor.  Yes, it was observational, but the study published in May in the New England Journal of Medicine looked at hundreds of thousands of men and women and found this bottom line result:  people who drank coffee lived longer than those who didn't...And the more they drank, the longer they lived.  If you are into that sort of thing.