June 18, 2008
This next topic is one with which we’re intimately familiar, having written each and every post you’ve seen here under its influence: but we’re not going to discuss absinthe or Haldol today. We’ll save those twin joys for another morning. Instead, we’re going to talk coffee.
In previous posts, we’ve examined mixing caffeinated beverages (so-called, ‘energy drinks’) with alcohol. It’s coffee though, as anyone who’s ever had to battle a crippling hangover to prep for that morning board meeting knows, that is the original energy drink.
[Editor's note: if you're determined to mix caffeinated beverages with alcohol, try a dollop of Sambuca in your morning espresso, Italian-style, rather than ruining perfectly good rum with some Coke---not that we'd endorse this for breakfast---we're speaking in general terms. However, having a Sambuca in your coffee for that aforementioned board meeting is highly recommended]
If you want to make your heart race, palms sweat and lose all faculties of speech, your best option is either falling in love, or, if a vacation to Amsterdam’s red light district exceeds your allotted travel budget, downing a cup of $4 dollar Starbucks coffee.
Studies looking at the health benefits of coffee are equivocal, to say the least, but as with any study, if you’re determined not to change your lifestyle/behavior in light of mounting, glacier-like evidence, it’s best to simply ignore all the negative outcomes and instead focus on the positive: for example, decreasing one’s risk for Parkinson’s by smoking cigarettes (despite increasing your risk for just about every other possible affliction you can think of). Of course, not being named Michael J Fox or Muhammad Ali, not becoming a professional boxer, or not slamming your head repeatedly into drywall is also linked with decreasing one’s risk of Parkinson’s. 
In a Spanish study involving nearly 85,000 participants, long-term health effects of the stuff that makes the prospect of 8:00AM classes and a dull cubicle job less gloomy, were examined.
The people who took part in the research completed questionnaires on how frequently they drank coffee, other diet habits, smoking and medical conditions, and hopefully didn’t pose too many questions to researchers about any hypotheses, of the ‘you mean you guys suspected that drinking carrot juice every week would kill me quickly and didn’t TELL me about it?’ variety.
Researchers then studied the mortality risk over the period of the study among people with different coffee-drinking habits, and not the ‘cream and sugar’ versus just ‘just black thanks’, variety, but the people (whoever they are) who don’t indulge. Women who reported drinking two to three cups of caffeinated coffee per day had a 25 percent lower risk of death from heart disease than women who abstained.
It’s possible that coffee drinking is linked to a go-getter attitude, of the type that doesn’t involve sleeping until noon, and that people who get up much earlier in the day are more likely to exercise or that it’s entirely difficult to be slothful when one is jittery, but that is just speculation.
