Coffee: is it Good or Bad for your Health?

A latte at Portland's 3rd St. Stumptown, August 2009

The news about coffee couldn't get much better: drinking it lessens one’s risk of type 2 diabetes, liver cirrhosis and gallstones—not to mention heart disease and cancer. It's a legal performance-enhancer. And according to a recent Finnish study, drinking 3-5 cups a day can even stave off dementia and Alzheimer’s Disease. Yet, as I write in the latest issue of Whole Living(pg. 127), coffee does have some downsides—and some people can tolerate the beverage better than others. To see the PDF:  Download CoffeeHealth

Coffee actually has a long history of medicinal use. In the 14th century, Arab women would drink it to alleviate menstrual discomforts; the Turks, for their part, claimed coffee was an aphrodisiac. The Indian Materia Medica prescribes coffee for everything from infant cholera to spasmodic asthma and states that coffee “assists assimilation and digestion” and even protects against malaria. In Chinese medicine, coffee would be classified as a medicinal herb that regulates liver qi and purges the gallbladder—which is to say it improves mood and promotes the production and flow of bile. (This explains coffee’s ability to prevent the formation of gallstones and alleviate constipation.) 

Despite coffee's proven health benefits, many in the holistic health world scorn the beverage, saying coffee depletes the adrenal glands (among other things). Subhuti Dharmananda, Ph.D., the director of the Institute for Traditional Medicine in Portland, Oregon, disagrees. “The frequently repeated comment that caffeine causes adrenal exhaustion was based on one old and not repeated animal study,” he told me. Nonetheless, he acknowledges that coffee is not right for everyone and says moderation is key: one to three 6-8 ounce cups a day is a good range. (A Starbucks “Tall” is 12 ounces—so try to limit yourself to two Talls. And lay off the Frappuccinos. Such sugar-laden beverages are “just a mess” says Dharmananda.)Coffee—which comes from a berry, let’s not forget—is a traditional beverage with a long history of being enjoyed by various cultures: it’s been cultivated since at least the 13th century, when Arabians began roasting and grinding the beans before brewing the bitter elixir. Michael Pollan's by-now well known edict “Don't eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food” has become my mantra. I’m sure my great-great-grandmother, who lived in Baltimore in the first half of the 20th century, wouldn’t know what to make of a Frappuccino. But I bet she drank and savoured her coffee. And so, then, will I.