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The surprisingly strong case for feeling great about your coffee habit

Your morning coffee is one of modern life’s underrated miracles.

There are few news subjects more reliably depressing than nutritional science.

A glance at the headlines will tell you that sugar is bad for you, red meat is bad for you, and alcohol is really, really bad for you. The message seems to be that if a food or drink gives you even an iota of pleasure, it’s almost certain that your body will pay for it, sooner or later.

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But there is one exception, a glorious concoction that was first consumed in ninth-century Ethiopia, that fueled the Age of Enlightenment, that has kept our troops going from the Revolutionary War to today. It is one of the first globally traded commodities, connecting producers in Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia to consumers around the world in a $245 billion market. It can be had flat or steamed, long or short, hot or iced, black or with milk, and in any number of combinations that end in the letters “-cino.”

However you take it, the equivalent of more than 2 billion cups of it are consumed every day. Unlike so many other products we experience in our daily lives, it’s actually been getting better and better. And medical science is increasingly finding that all those cups are actually good for us.I’m referring, of course, to the daily miracle that is coffee. Our grandparents were told to cut back on this dirty-tasting beverage but today, it has become one of the most studied and virtuous and quietly luxurious parts of the human diet. All in all, coffee — yes, coffee — is one of the best reasons to be alive in the year 2026.

Coffee and cigarettes

A generation ago, coffee was supposed to be something you quit, like cigarettes or that second martini. Doctors would warn pregnant women against drinking it; cardiologists would tell their middle-aged patients to give it up. The World Health Organization’s International Research Agency for Cancer kept it on its “possibly carcinogenic” list for 25 years, only downgrading it in 2016 after a review of the evidence found no clear link.

Can the right diet really cure all our health problems?

Why exactly was something as seemingly innocuous as coffee considered a real health threat for so long? Coffee contains caffeine (yes, even decaf in small amounts), caffeine is a stimulant, and stimulants can have an impact on heart health. There were 20th-century studies that linked coffee consumption to pancreatic cancer, bladder cancer, and even birth defects. None of those studies have held up to scrutiny, however, and the reason why is a classic bugaboo of medical research: confounding factors.

For much of the 20th century,........

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