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Please Stop Telling Me to Cut Out Coffee
Why don’t I just start eating kale while I’m at it?
Another day, another article here or elsewhere telling me that coffee is bad for me and I should not only cut back, but cut it out altogether. I’m tired of hearing it at this point because let’s face it, on the harm scale of mild to crystal meth, coffee barely even warrants a place.
I love everything about coffee — I love the taste, the aroma, the syrupy mouthfeel of a strong piccolo or espresso. For myself and many others, coffee isn’t about the caffeine, it’s about the entire experience.
Oh, I should try green tea? Matcha is really catching on? Well fantastic, how about I just empty my lawnmower clippings into a pot of boiling water and drink that. Seriously, suggesting I substitute my coffee for something that tastes like bitter grass water is akin to suggesting that I replace sex with reading The Wall Street Journal.
That’s how big the gap in enjoyment is.
Ok, so let’s get a bit more serious here. Why are there all these articles telling us that we need to be drinking tea instead of coffee? For every article you can find that tells me how bad coffee is for you, I can find one that spells out numerous benefits. And there are a lot. I find it especially annoying that they always tout how many antioxidants and polyphenols are in green tea, when coffee has just as many of its own.
I think the problem with coffee is that it’s one of those nutritional boogeymen: people have enjoyed it for a long time and at some point, someone found something wrong with it, so now it’s on that list of foods that will forever be subject to unfair scrutiny. So just like saturated fat, red meat and red wine, coffee continually has its day in the sun every time the media or some dickhead wellness guru need to recycle some content.
The real issue with coffee is people’s behaviour, not the beverage itself.
Being in America a couple of times really opened my eyes up to that. In Australia its common to drink 2–3 cups a day. For me that’s a shot of espresso with a small dash of milk (called a piccolo latte) and 1 sugar. Very little in the way of calories or caffeine. In…
