Study this: Drink coffee if you enjoy it
Published 11:00 pm Saturday, May 19, 2012
It’s celebration time. After years of ingesting studies — along with copious amounts of coffee — that the brown beverage delight will cause me anything from severe ricketts to cancer to gangrene, the largest study of its kind found that those who drink plenty of coffee reduced their chances of an early death by 10 to 16 percent.
I knew that if I ignored studies — which rank as high on the list with polls for things to ignore — one would come out that would prove drinking too much coffee is OK.
I have often said the day the doctor tells me to stop drinking coffee is the day I go find a different doctor.
Coffee is not alone, though. Highfalutin organizations, usually on the taxpayers’ dime, study everything. For every milk is destroying your brain study, I could find one that says drinking five glasses of milk per day will make your bones 21 percent stronger than those who only drink one glass per day.
Likewise, any poll that says Barack Obama has a 10 point lead on Mitt Romney, several others will point to Romney leading by six points.
Even the huge coffee study of 400,000 drinkers only included about .1 percent of the American population. There is no one-sized-fits-all study for every American. We are all different. These studies aren’t worth the paper they are printed on, because in a year, a different institute will issue a study that counters the National Institute of Health’s study.
I propose a study on people that just want to live. If you enjoy coffee in the morning, whether one cup or eight cups, drink the coffee. If you like a fried egg sandwich in the morning, go for it. Don’t let a study deter you.
And speaking of eggs, has any foodstuff been more controversial in studies than eggs? One year an egg will guarantee you heart disease and the next month, eggs will ward off dementia.
Expect more studies on eggs, bread and milk. Americans studies and our government is more than willing to fund them.
Remember, it was the federal government that recently shelled out taxpayer dollars to conduct a study on studies.
I plan to wake early this morning, load the coffeemaker full to the brim, sit on the front porch listening to the birds and enjoy more than two cups of java.
I won’t do it because a study told me I might live longer. I’ll do it because I enjoy coffee. And that is study enough for me.
•
Sean P. Murphy can be reached at smurphy@vicksburgpost.com