Comment by rendall | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rendall | Hacker News Reader

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The claim that some people with high blood pressure may risk cardiovascular harm from coffee is supported, under certain conditions, especially severe hypertension and heavier consumption. This is true.

The more general inference everybody with any high blood pressure or health risk should avoid coffee is not supported by the bulk of epidemiological evidence: moderate coffee use appears at worst neutral for many people, possibly beneficial for some.

A comprehensive meta-analysis of decades' worth of cohort studies concluded that moderate coffee consumption (roughly 2-5 cups/day) was associated with a lower or neutral risk of cardiovascular disease overall (coronary heart disease, stroke, heart failure, CVD mortality) compared to no coffee.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3945962/

So drink up! Drink all the coffees! Unless you are a reply-guy with severe heart problems and an uncontrollable compulsion to drink mass quantities, then talk to a doctor first.

Also don't drink coffee if you don't like it, or you're a Mormon, a strict Seventh-day Adventist, a member of certain Pentecostal or Anabaptist groups, a Theravāda Buddhist monk, a strict Salafist, or part of a strict Ital-observant Rastafarian community. If in doubt, speak to your bishop, branch president, pastor, priest, imam, monk, or whoever guides your spiritual tradition.

While that study is interesting, I was responding to:

> Everybody should drink coffee. There is no good reason not to.

Clearly there are many reasons not to drink coffee that may or may not apply to you and so saying that everyone should be drinking coffee is wrong.

I'm a caffeine/coffee consumer because I like its effects, and the claims to overall physiological benefits appear solid, but why do you think multiple and varied spiritual schools choose to forgo it, especially in coffee form?

I don't think that, when all is considered, there are that many spiritual traditions that forbid it, and there seems to be no unifying principle from the ones that do. Mormons forbid "hot drinks" that are, for historical reasons, interpreted to include coffee. Salafists do it because certain early jurists briefly classified coffee as an intoxicant. Seventh-day Adventists avoid stimulants as part of a broader health code. Theravāda monks avoid anything that affects wakefulness after midday. A few Pentecostal or Anabaptist groups inherited older temperance rules about stimulants. These prohibitions all come from very different origins, and none of them amounts to a shared spiritual insight about coffee itself.

In fact, so few spiritual traditions do forbid it, including the most forbidding and censorious, that it may well be considered miraculous. In my personal religion it is tantamount to a sacrament ;)

Absolute slam dunk of a comment, well said!

Thank you. I'm apparently passionate about it. I can understand not liking the taste, or hating the jitters, or belonging to a religion that discourages it, but as it's one of the very few unambiguously good and healthy joys of this imperfect world, I cannot abide to hear it run down as bad for your health.

> I cannot abide to hear it run down as bad for your health.

I didn't say it was bad for health as a general statement, I said that there are many people out there who suffer negative health consequences from caffeine consumption, in response to you telling everyone to drink coffee.

I actually like coffee, I have a fancy hand grinder and everything, my body just doesn't handle it well when consumed on a regular basis and I know people who've had to quit because it made their anxiety so bad that they started getting panic attacks. Telling "everyone" to drink coffee because there's no good reason not to is just wrong and careless and potentially dangerous.

"Not everyone should" != "nobody should"

You’re picking at hairs. “Everyone” was being used colloquially by them, not literally.

Fine. Everyone should do pure pharmaceutical-grade [cocaine, opioids, cannabis, nicotine], there's no good reason not to, in moderation.

I mean, we already knew you were being a jerk and being intent on presenting bad faith arguments, but way to really spell it out for us.

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