Bryan Mercadente’s refusal to drink tea or coffee has always struck me as the sort of eccentricity that begins in temperament and ends in doctrine. Some boys dislike a thing and leave it there. Bryan dislikes a thing and constructs a worldview around not liking it. Coffee, in his imagination, is not merely bitter. It is suspicious. It is an intrusion into the natural order. One can almost hear him saying that a properly self-commanding man ought to wake by force of will alone and stare down the morning unaided. That is nonsense. It is also unhistorical.

Before saying anything about health, it is worth beginning where coffee itself begins: not in a nutrition paper or an American lifestyle column, but in the long movement of goods and habits and ideas across the world. The familiar legends place coffee’s discovery in Ethiopia, with stories clustering around holy men, exiles, monks, and a goat-herd named Kaldi. Those stories are impossible to verify, but they preserve something important all the same: coffee belongs to that belt of exchange linking eastern Africa and Arabia, and its first secure written history lies in the late medieval trade between Ethiopia and Yemen. From there it spread through the Islamic world, helped by Sufi devotion and mercantile routes. By the fifteenth century coffee was being traded in Yemen; by the sixteenth and seventeenth it had reached Venice, England, and France, where it became bound up with commerce and the sociable intellect.

That movement matters because coffee was not adopted in Europe by accident. It arrived at exactly the point when much of Europe was beginning to prefer wakefulness to stupor. The old breakfast table of ale and small beer gave way, slowly and unevenly, to hot drinks that sharpened the mind rather than clouded it. Coffeehouses in England became famous as places of reading, argument, financial dealing, and political gossip. The cliché about the “penny university” exists for a reason. Even if one allows for romantic exaggeration, the underlying point is right. Coffee was not merely consumed; it reorganised parts of urban life. It suited merchants, pamphleteers, dissenters, clerks, speculators, and all the other overstimulated builders of the modern world. Thomas Jefferson’s remark that coffee was the favourite beverage of the civilised world was not an empty flourish. It expressed a wider truth about the drink’s association with mental readiness and work.

There is something rather pleasing in that. Civilisations reveal themselves not only by what they build, but by what they sip while building it. A people who prefer a drink that steadies attention and extends useful wakefulness over one that produces midday softness has, at the very least, made an intelligent choice. This is not to say that coffee caused the modern world. That would be silly. But it fitted the temper of a world that increasingly valued punctuality, calculation, productivity, and abstract thought. One begins to see why Bryan’s repudiation of coffee feels less like a personal preference than a tiny rebellion against civilisation itself.

Still, history and atmosphere only take one so far. The larger question is whether coffee is actually good for health. Here a recent review article in Nutrients is useful precisely because it is broad, up to date, and unusually restrained in tone. Emadi and Kamangar survey decades of research and conclude that moderate coffee intake is, on balance, more beneficial than harmful across a wide range of outcomes. Their summary is not built on one miraculous experiment or one fashionable panic. It rests on a great many cohort studies and meta-analyses, often involving very large populations across different countries. The overall pattern they report is consistent: moderate coffee consumption, usually around three to five cups a day, is associated with lower all-cause mortality and lower risks for several major diseases, including cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, stroke, cognitive decline, and some cancers. The same review also notes that both caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee show benefits, which matters because it suggests coffee is not merely a caffeine-delivery system but a chemically richer drink with multiple biologically active compounds.

One should be careful here. Association is not the same as proof of causation, and nutritional epidemiology has a bad reputation partly because people keep pretending otherwise. But there comes a point where consistency across studies deserves respect. The Nutrients review notes that large prospective studies from the United States, Europe, and Asia keep arriving at much the same destination. A 2019 meta-analysis cited in the review found the lowest relative risk for all-cause mortality at around 3.5 cups per day. That is not the language of miracle cure or folk superstition. It is the language of a sensible habit that appears, in ordinary doses, to be better than abstinence. Harvard’s public-health material says much the same in plainer terms: moderate coffee intake, roughly two to five cups a day, is associated with lower risks of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, liver and endometrial cancers, Parkinson’s disease, and depression, and may also lower the risk of early death.

The most important of these findings, in some ways, is not any single disease-specific claim but the one about overall mortality. There is a brutal honesty to that measure. If a thing truly harms human health in a broad and serious way, it usually shows up in the death totals eventually. Yet repeated cohort studies have found lower mortality among coffee drinkers. The Nutrients review highlights large studies, including the NIH-AARP Diet and Health Study and other multinational cohorts, showing roughly a 10 to 15 per cent reduction in mortality among those drinking around two or more cups daily. When different populations, with different diets and confounders, keep producing similar patterns, it becomes harder to dismiss the result as statistical mist.

Then there is cardiovascular health, which used to be the favourite field for anti-coffee scaremongering. For years one heard that coffee would ruin the heart, drive up blood pressure, and leave the body vibrating towards collapse. The newer evidence is much less melodramatic. The Nutrients review cites meta-analytic evidence that cardiovascular risk is lowest around three to five cups a day, with reduced risks of coronary heart disease and stroke. A 2024 position paper from the International Society of Hypertension, endorsed by the World Hypertension League and European Society of Hypertension, states that moderate regular coffee consumption, around three to four cups a day, does not adversely affect blood pressure or the cardiovascular system and may even be moderately beneficial. That is not fringe advocacy. It is about as establishment a reassurance as one could hope to get.

The same pattern appears with cancer. This is another area where popular discussion lagged behind the evidence for years. The 2025 review points out that the International Agency for Research on Cancer concluded in 2016 that coffee is not classifiable as carcinogenic to humans and that evidence since then has tended to support either neutrality or benefit, especially for liver and endometrial cancers. Harvard’s nutrition guidance likewise notes anti-inflammatory and antioxidant mechanisms that may help explain some of these benefits. One should not turn coffee into a talisman against malignancy, but neither should one cling to the old mythology that it is somehow a slow poison in a mug. That case now looks very weak.

Type 2 diabetes is perhaps even more striking. The review summarises meta-analytic evidence showing substantially lower diabetes risk among coffee drinkers, with reductions on the order of roughly 29 per cent in some analyses, and similar trends seen for both caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee. There are plausible mechanisms for this, involving glucose balance, insulin sensitivity, liver function, and reduced inflammation. Again, it is the convergence of epidemiology and mechanism that makes the case persuasive. We are not looking at one convenient datapoint but at a durable pattern.

The liver, too, seems to like coffee more than moralists do. The review finds evidence that coffee is associated with lower risks of liver fibrosis and with reduced risk of hepatocellular carcinoma in several analyses. Even where the story is more mixed, as with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, the general direction is not one of harm. This matters because the liver is one of those organs that modern life treats appallingly. Any ordinary habit that appears to protect it is worth defending.

Then there is the mind. Coffee’s short-term cognitive effects are the least surprising thing about it, because almost anyone who has ever been alive before nine in the morning has experienced them. Caffeine blocks adenosine receptors, increases alertness, improves vigilance, and shortens reaction time. The review also surveys evidence linking coffee to lower risks of cognitive disorders and Parkinson’s disease. That does not mean every cup is a philosophical revelation. It means that the habit appears to support mental function both in the moment and, perhaps, over the longer course of life. There is also evidence of lower depressive symptoms among coffee drinkers, though here, as ever, one must beware of reducing the soul to a food-frequency questionnaire. Still, if one asks whether coffee is likely to sharpen the mind more than it dulls it, the answer is plainly yes.

I find one part of the review especially amusing. Coffee, it says, is associated with fewer injuries and accidents. That sounds almost comic until one thinks about it for five seconds. Of course a drink that improves alertness may reduce crashes and falls. It also fits the older civilisational argument. Coffee is not simply a beverage; it is a behavioural aid to attention. One begins to suspect that many avoidable modern disasters might be reduced if more people were slightly less drowsy and slightly more caffeinated.

The well-being section of the review is also worth noting because it corrects several tedious myths. Coffee contributes to hydration; moderate coffee intake does not dehydrate regular drinkers in the way people used to claim. It can improve sports performance. It enhances mental acuity. It may even help bowel recovery after colorectal surgery. Here coffee appears not as a guilty pleasure but as a rather versatile and competent servant. That seems closer to the truth of the thing.

Now, none of this means that coffee is good in every form, for every person, at every hour, and in every quantity. That would be childish. The same review is clear that pregnant women should keep caffeine below about 200 mg a day, and that excessive caffeinated coffee can worsen anxiety or disrupt sleep. The sleep point matters. Coffee is most defensible when it is used intelligently and not as a desperate attempt to outwit one’s own bad habits. A strong cup at breakfast is one thing. A sequence of late afternoon rescues followed by a complaint of insomnia is something else. There are also individual differences in tolerance. Some people handle coffee nobly; others turn theatrical after two mugs. Prudence is still a virtue.

There is also the question of additives, and here I am entirely unsentimental. One reason coffee has sometimes been unjustly blamed for bad health is that people do not really drink coffee so much as sugar, syrups, whipped cream, and melted confectionery in a coffee-coloured vehicle. The Nutrients review is quite explicit that sugar may weaken or nullify some of coffee’s benefits. Unsweetened coffee, and coffee with only low levels of added sugar and saturated fat, appears to retain the mortality benefit more clearly than heavily doctored versions. The FDA’s recent rule allowing certain low-calorie coffee preparations to qualify for a “healthy” claim reflects this distinction. In plain English, black coffee is good; pudding in a paper cup is a different matter.

This is where I should add my own minor heresy against the bleak puritans and the syrup-lovers alike. Coffee is excellent in the morning, and better still when mixed with spices. Cinnamon is the obvious companion. Cloves, cardamom, and nutmeg can also do admirable service in small amounts. I say this partly for taste, and partly because the morning ritual matters. Civilisation depends to an almost embarrassing degree on little ceremonies of ordering the self. To grind beans, heat water, add spice, and begin the day with something bitter, fragrant, and mentally clarifying is a better start to life than snatching fluorescent sweetness from a fridge. The modern world is full of people who have lost the art of beginning the day properly. Coffee, especially spiced coffee, is one small recovery of that art.

I would not push the claim too far. The article you supplied is about coffee, not about my preferred embellishments. But it does point towards something larger. Coffee’s benefits are not only chemical. They are also cultural. It encourages wakefulness, reading, work, conversation, and rhythm. It belongs to desks, libraries, railway stations, study lamps, seminar rooms, chapel cloisters, and early-morning kitchens. It is hard to imagine the intellectual life of the last three centuries without it. One should hesitate before insulting a drink that has accompanied so much thought.

So yes, coffee is good for health, within the bounds of ordinary sense. The balance of evidence now leans that way rather strongly. Moderate intake is associated with lower mortality, lower risks for several major diseases, better alertness, decent hydration, and improved physical and cognitive performance. The fears about cancer, blood pressure, and arrhythmia now look much weaker than they once did, while the case for benefit looks stronger. That does not make coffee a sacrament or a substitute for discipline. But it does mean that Bryan Mercadente’s proud abstinence is not a mark of superior wisdom. It is, at best, an unnecessary renunciation of one of civilisation’s most useful pleasures.

There are worse errors in life than refusing coffee. Still, it is an error. The world discovered a bean in the highlands of Africa, refined a habit in Arabia, built a culture around it in Europe, and then spent decades discovering that the drink may actually help keep us alive. One ought to show a little gratitude. Rise in the morning, then. Grind the beans. Add a little cinnamon. Perhaps a clove or two. Drink while the mind is still clean. The civilised world has been doing some version of that for centuries, and it appears to have been right.

Reading list

Emadi, Ryan C., and Farin Kamangar. “Coffee’s Impact on Health and Well-Being.” Nutrients 17, no. 15 (2025): 2558. DOI: 10.3390/nu17152558. (MDPI)

Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “Coffee.” The Nutrition Source. (The Nutrition Source)

Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “Is coffee good or bad for your health?” 2021. (Harvard Chan School of Public Health)

Charchar, F. J., et al. “Lifestyle management of hypertension: International Society of Hypertension position paper endorsed by the World Hypertension League and European Society of Hypertension.” Journal of Hypertension 42 (2024). (Lippincott Journals)

Poole, Robin, et al. “Coffee consumption and health: Umbrella review of meta-analyses of multiple health outcomes.” BMJ 359 (2017): j5024. (PubMed)

Cafédirect. “The History of Coffee.” Company blog. Useful as a concise overview of the standard legends and commercial spread of coffee from Ethiopia and Yemen into the Middle East and Europe. (Cafédirect)