Is Coffee Healthy?
September 17, 2014 - By Hedley Turk
Did you know that coffee is good for you? Oops, sorry, that study was released yesterday. Today another study came out that said coffee was bad for you. But not to worry, tomorrow another study will be released, announcing that coffee will once again be good for you. However, you’d better drink that cup quickly because you know what will happen the following day.
A glass of wine each day is good for you. A glass of wine each day is bad for you. Chocolate is good for you. Chocolate is bad for you. Milk is good for you. Milk is bad for you. Are you recognizing a pattern?
Is wine good for you? It is when the study is being paid for by the National Wine Institute. Is chocolate good for you? It is when the study is being paid for by the Chocolate Manufacturing Association or the cocoa bean industry. Is milk good for you? It is when the study is being paid for by the dairy industry. When a study produces results that don’t sound very logical or seem too good to be true, it usually means the study is being funded by an organization with a financial interest in the results.
Did you know that for years the tobacco industry would cite studies that found no relevant link between smoking and illness? Who do you think paid for those studies? This may sound ridiculous or even funny to you now, but how many people do you think died as a result of that misinformation? How many people do you think are kidding themselves today, believing the results of a study that promotes a product as being healthy or beneficial, when in fact the opposite is true?
Another reason why you should be wary of the results of health studies is because long-term cause and effect is very difficult to prove in the human body. With human beings, there are so many variables impacting a person over the course of a lifetime that unless you lock a person in a room for thirty years and control every variable influencing his or her body, isolating the effect of one particular food or drug over a long period of time is extremely difficult.
Instead of just looking to health studies for answers, whose methods and funding you can’t confirm, you have to use your education, experience, observation, and common sense to decide whether something is good for you or not.
Is coffee good for you? Let’s use our education, experience, observation, and common sense to answer that. Coffee is a stimulant. It gives you energy. It does that by artificially speeding up your metabolism, including your heart rate. Do you think that artificially speeding up your heart is healthy for you?
– Excerpt from “Why Intelligent People Are Overweight” by Hedley Turk….available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble and iTunes.
