By Mark Salamon, August 1, 2019
As a coffee lover, I never get tired of telling people that drinking coffee has been shown to decrease the chances of cancer of the liver, uterus, oral cavity, pharynx, brain, colon, and rectum, decrease the risks for cardiovascular disease and stroke, improve mental performance, and improve physical performance for long and short duration activities. (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9)
But all this pales in comparison to recent coffee research out of the William Harvey Research Institute at Queen Mary University of London, which shows that drinking coffee does not cause stiffening of the arteries EVEN IF YOU DRINK TWENTY-FIVE CUPS PER DAY.
To put that in perspective, this would amount to a cup every thirty-eight minutes from the time you get up to the time you go to bed. Even at the height of my caffeine addiction in grad school, I never came close to that number. In fact, I only ever knew one person who consumed that much coffee. His name was Don. He was about sixty when I knew him, and he looked like what I imagine Keith Richards will look like if he lives another twenty years. So that scares me a little. But Don also smoked, although looking back, I’m not sure how he had time to smoke. He must have been skilled in getting quick puffs in between gulps of coffee. But the point is, according to this new research, it was probably the cigarettes that did him in.
In the name of scientific inquiry, I felt compelled to study how this level of consumption would affect my daily life. During my experiment I kept a detailed journal and set rigorous parameters, setting my phone to vibrate every thirty-eight minutes from the time I awoke in the morning until I went to bed at night. I had to adjust these parameters fairly early on in the study because after the first day I stopped actually going to bed. This led to a host of benefits. First, I stopped snoring. Second, I had all this extra time to get things done. Third, I didn’t have to actually use this time to get things done because of the hallucinations. Third, the hallucinations allowed me to answer all the unanswerable questions mankind has struggled with since mankind came out of the itinerant whirlpool of creative effort to enhance the modes of operations of singular quantums of cosmic soup…
Ok, that’s where my notes became a little hard to follow, so I elected to terminate my study at that point. To summarize the results, while twenty-five cups of coffee per day can produce a wide range of health benefits, you should stop if you experience any of the following side effects: violent tremors, oily discharge, sudden knowledge of the meaning of life, an erection lasting more than four hours (even if you’re not sure if it’s real), threats of divorce from your spouse, or seeing Keith Richards in the mirror.