Every so often, a bleary-eyed friend tells me they’ve quit coffee. My response to this is always the same: Why? Because my long-held hunch — based on many years of following this stuff as a health and science writer — has been that coffee is probably not bad for you, and may even be quite good for you, a theory now backed by a recent video post from Dr. Aaron E. Carroll, a professor of pediatrics at the Indiana University School of Medicine. Carroll combs through an impressive amount of high-quality data and finds almost no evidence that even the more enthusiastic coffee drinkers among us — those who down five or six or even seven cups a day — are risking their health for their favored vice.
Coffee consumption, in fact, probably shouldn’t even be considered a vice, says Carroll, though he notes that it’s the stuff we put in our coffee — sugar and flavored syrup and the like — that turns it into liquid candy. “It’s way past time that we stopped viewing coffee itself as something we need to cut back on,” he concludes. So noted.