Drinking 3-4 Cups of Coffee Is “More Likely to Benefit Health Than to Harm It”
I'm going to go out on a limb here and state a theory I've been considering for a while that could explain these coffee health benefit results...<p>The liquids I and everyone else consumes can be placed in two classes: pure water and everything else.<p>When I'm not drinking pure water, my drink of choice is usually coffee, of which I drink about 3 cups a day.<p>Now let's think of the alternative non water drinks out there... Many of them are sodas which have obscenely high sugar levels, just like most drinks that aren't pure water.<p>Someone who doesn't drink coffee may have more of these sugar containing drinks when they're not drinking pure water, inundating their bodies with harmful amounts of sugar.<p>So the benefits we see from high levels of coffee consumption come not from the coffee itself but from a substitution effect of replacing unhealthy sugary drinks with coffee.<p>A good test for this would be to see if tea drinkers also experience health benefits similar to those seen in the study. If not then that may indicate that my theory is wrong.