Personal Health: Sorting Out Coffee’s Contradictions

nytimes.com

9 pointsrobg3 comments

I wish people would just go about their lives and stop swinging between coffee/alcohol/chocolate/meat binges and abstinence. There is a middle road you can take and you don't need to stress so much. Just role the dice and get on with life. After all that's what we are bloody here for!

Sorry, rant over.

Classifying items into a straight Good/Bad category makes for good article baiting. (Coffee: Is it Bad for You?)

Coffee, like just about everything else on this planet, has good and bad characteristics. One will find that the negative effects of anything that impacts the body will occur at either extreme of the consumption range. (No consumption or Over-Consumption)

As with anything, moderation is the key to avoiding most side-effects. Granted, articles instructing you to moderate consumption are not nearly as provocative.

While that's all true, it misses the fact that people want rules. We're classifiers by nature: our brains want to sort things into "good" and "bad" regardless of what the truth is. The only solution here is to educate everyone about all the subtleties of the issue and force them into using more fine-grained categories.

Which, if you read it, is kinda what this article is trying (vainly, maybe) to do.

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