Coffee: Good to you Bad For You?

So a guy comes up to me while I'm selling coffee and says...."you have any tea"? I tell him no and he tells me that I should, because there is a seismic shift towards tea drinking, large enough to create entire continents and I need to get with it.  I was waiting for him to tell me 'all the cool kids are doing it'.  But he went one better (or worse).  He said  "People are switching to tea because it has less caffeine". It was time to dispel the tea myth.  Here it goes: Tea contains more caffeine than coffee by dry weight.  A typical serving contains much less caffeine than coffee because tea is normally brewed much weaker.   His muttered response - as he walked away - was the 'adult' equivalent of 'so what'. To me that's what you say when you have nothing to say but - you want the last word.  Whatever.

Caffeine in general is so ninja, the average person doesn't realize that it's in a lot of stuff  - coffee, tea, many cola drinks and over the counter medication.  Yet coffee always  gets accused of being villain because caffeine is most commonly ingested through coffee.

If you are one of those people who drink several cups of coffee daily, you probably wonder what all that coffee is doing to you. ROFL!  Yeah right! If you're one of THOSE people you  probably don't care!  But seriously, is coffee really bad for you, or is drinking coffee just a harmless vice?  Can it be possible that coffee is actually good for us?  Look at the results of some recent research:  .

• There are nutritional advisers who claim that coffee makes us age faster, wears out our adrenal glands, and wreaks unspeakable damage to our cells.

• In some older people, coffee or tea can improve memory and alertness enough to partly offset the effects of aging. 

• Other researchers claim that coffee, especially if it's freshly roasted and ground, is full of antioxidants, and therefore good for us.  Most doctors say that drinking one or two cups of coffee a day is probably not harmful.  And of course there are others who say we ought to avoid caffeine altogether.

•  Caffeine gives brain cells a temporary boost .  But the amount required to improve mental performance is not very high.  Even half a cup of coffee will be enough to give your brain a boost that lasts several hours.  Which is precisely why many of us drink coffee, especially the first thing in the morning.

For those that are wondering where I'm going with this, here it it is, the definitive response to the raging coffee vs. tea question: Drink the d@%n coffee!

Avoid excessive consumption of coffee ( or anything else for that matter). What's excessive? Depends on the individual.  If  four cups of coffee a day makes you  jittery, nauseous, suffer insomnia, kick the dog, cuss out your boss and walk of your job or demonstrate and other extreme behaviors, you should probably cut back on the caffeine. Seriously. You really should.

If you don't suffer from any of the above by your fourth cup....carry on!

 

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