The healthfulness or otherwise of coffee has long been journalistic fodder, there to fill in the gaps on some of the slower news days. โA new report says coffee will prevent colon cancer,โ โa newer report says drinking a single cup of coffee will reduce your lifespan by five years,โ and so on and so forth. As the news editor at Sprudge, I see them all, in all their contradictory glory. (If youโd like to see what a day in the life of a coffee news editor is like, please enjoy this unedited photo.)
Coffee, how does it work? No one really knows. Or rather, a lot of studies say they know but they all have different answers. But according to the Washington Post, thereโs a new study that studies all the studies, andโstop me if youโve heard this one beforeโit says that coffee is good for you.
Led by Giuseppe Grosso, a nutritional epidemiologist at the University of Catania in Italy, this new report meta-analyzes 127 previous studies on coffee, which is basically just a fun way of saying that they looked at the strength of the arguments presented in the studies. Each study was then assigned a rating, from โconvincingโ down to โlimited.โ None of the 127 studies received a rating of โconvincingโ because, as the Washington Post notes, โobservational studies lack the rigor of ยญgold-standard trials that use placebo controls.โ But, many studies were found to be โprobableโ and they showed links between drinking coffee and reduced risks of developing โmany common cancers including breast, colorectal, colon, endometrial and prostate.โ
Additionally, the study โsolved some earlier discrepanciesโ about coffeeโs part in increasing risk for high blood pressure and โdeath from all cancers,โ which sounds like a curse youโd hear as the last words of a character dying in one of Shakespeareโs tragedies. As it turns out, many of these studies โadequately control for smoking โ a habit thatโs strongly linked to coffee consumption.โ In fact, when you looked at the just the data on non-smokers from these same studies, moderate coffee consumption was shown to provide some protection from the very diseases it was being said to cause.
So that’s it. Coffee’s Metacritic score is “healthy.” Please don’t make me read anymore articles on how 12 cups of coffee a day will make you an inch shorter over a 20 year span or whatever the next study will say. We’ve got the result we want, so let’s just leave it at that.
Zac Cadwaladerย is the news editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas.ย Read more Zac Cadwaladerย on Sprudge.
*top image fromย How A Science Lecture Helped Maxwell Colonna-Dashwood Win The UK Barista Championship
