Good News for Coffee Drinkers (?)

This is sort of a curious article about the health effects of coffee from the New York Times. It's entitled "Sorting Out Coffee's Contradictions" and one of the early paragraphs asserts that "hardly a month goes by without a report that hails coffee, tea or caffeine as healthful or damns them as potential killers." Such an opening led me to assume that the research shows a mixed bag of positive and negative health effects. But the actual research cited in the article seems to be overwhelmingly positive. A more appropriate summary would seem to be, "We used to think coffee was pretty bad for you, but the more recent studies show the dangers are overblown and it's actually pretty good for you". The main points from the article:

• Hydration. They used to think that caffeinated drinks were diuretics (i.e. they make you pee) but this turns out only to be true when you consume caffeine at very high dosages (bigger than a Starbuck's 'grande').


• Heart disease. There's no enduring evidence showing a greater risk of heart attacks or abnormal heart rhythm among regular coffee drinkers. In fact, coffee may reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease.


• Blood pressure. No apparent association between coffee and high blood pressure, although cola apparently does contribute to high blood pressure.


• Cancer. Pancreatic or kidney cancer? "Little to no effect". Liver cancer? Coffee may lower your risk. Breast cancer? No connection.


• Bone loss. Kind of ambiguous results, but whatever negative effects coffee might have on calcium levels are more than made up for if you already consume the recommended amount of calcium in your diet.


• Weight loss. Coffee apparently speeds up your metabolism so you burn more calories, but long-term studies show either no connection between weight and coffee or greater weight gain among coffee drinkers. So you're not going to lose weight by drinking coffee, but I'd argue that if coffee drinking is the best weight loss plan you can come up with then you probably deserve to stay chubby.


• Exercise. Coffee apparently augments the benefits of aerobic and anaerobic exercise.


• Parkinson's disease. Coffee drinkers (but not decaf drinkers!) had 30 percent lower risk of Parkinson's disease in a recent review of studies.


• Type 2 diabetes. People who drink four to six cups of coffee per day (both regular and decaf) had a 28 percent lower risk of this kind of diabetes, according to another recent review.

And now for the real shocker:

• Mood and mental performance. Surprise! Coffee drinkers "report an improved sense of well-being, happiness, energy, alertness and sociability".

Really, that's pretty much the whole article. So please show me the "contradictions" and the studies that damn coffee as a potential killer that reportedly come out every month. Otherwise I'll just have to conclude that all that coffee I drink is pretty good for me.