Coffee Is Probably Not Bad for You

Great News! Coffee Is Probably Not Bad For You
This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.
- Waikiki -
- Waikiki -

By Melissa DahlEvery 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.

More from Science of Us:

Also on HuffPost:

Make coffee ice cubes.

The Best Iced Coffee Hacks

Popular in the Community

Close

HuffPost Shopping’s Best Finds

MORE IN LIFE