3 to 4 cups of coffee can do more good than bad for your body,

[tango42]

USA TODAY: 3 to 4 cups of coffee can do more good than bad for your body, study suggests.

3 to 4 cups of coffee can do more good than bad for your body, study suggests

[finley]

An editorial by Eliseo Guallar from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Md., says there is no way to know if coffee prevents chronic disease and reduces mortality because there are too many factors to weigh like why people start drinking coffee and what kind of coffee drinks they’re drinking.

This is the problem that almost all dietary studies suffer from. You can usually find a tenuous statistical association between random thingy X and random thingy Y purely because of (as per Dirk Gently) “the fundamental interconnectedness of all things”. For example, there’s a correlation between birth rate and stork migration (in autumn) because people tend to make their own entertainment during the depths of winter.

It could just be that coffee-drinkers are generally less obsessed with what’s good for you and what isn’t, and are therefore less likely to have heart disease (stress being a major causative factor).

[lostinasia]

@finley

It could just be that coffee-drinkers are generally less obsessed with what’s good for you and what isn’t, and are therefore less likely to have heart disease (stress being a major causative factor).

I wonder if there’s a displacement effect. The people who are drinking 3-4 cups of coffee aren’t drinking soda. And basically anything that makes you drink less sugar is a good thing.

[finley]

@lostinasia

I wonder if there’s a displacement effect. The people who are drinking 3-4 cups of coffee aren’t drinking soda. And basically anything that makes you drink less sugar is a good thing.

I guess a lot of people put sugar in their coffee, but yeah, it’ll be less than you get in a can of Coke, so could well be something like that going on. I think this sort of effect is why dieticians are convinced that vegetables are especially good for you: the simpler explanation is that people who eat more veg are probably just eating less junk food.

[Laochris]

I do intermittent fasting so I don’t eat breakfast. I do however drink black coffee since it doesn’t affect fasting glucose and it suppresses appetite. To this day I’ve yet to experience a negative effect. In the past I did a lot of research into the subject of whether many daily cups of coffee is good or bad and it’s been positive. Check the military studies because they can conduct experiments that wouldn’t get funded through a university.