JAVA JIVE

In my younger and more tasteless days, my standard answer to "How do you like your coffee?" was "The way I like my women: hot, strong, and black." For some reason, this went over better with guys than women, especially those who hadn't reached voting age yet. 

But according to two recent medical studies, I seem to have been on to something. Now I just have to figure out which one to choose.

I'd rather live a 15%-17% shorter life than wear an
apron like that in front of my homies.

The first, from something called StudyFinds, tells us that drinking one to three cups of coffee daily offers a 15%-17% chance of living longer than those who drink either decaf or tea. And if you do drink java juice, make sure it's black without sugar. Otherwise, you won't live as long as tough guys like me who prefer it straight. 

The second comes courtesy of SciTechDaily. In a study involving people age 55 and over, regular coffee drinking helps to reduce the onset of frailty. But as with the other study, there's a catch. In order the reap the benefits, you need to drink four to six or more cups a day. 

First tip: convince the police you aren't a
suicide bomber.

What the what? Six cups a day? Many years ago, I spent 24 hours strapped with a Holter Monitor when just three cups a day started to make my heart go into its Buddy Rich tribute. 

Those several extra thousand heartbeats that the monitor recorded didn't make me several thousand times healthier. I spent the next decade or so drinking decaf until eventually easing myself up to one or two cups a day, where I remain today. 

Hey kid, didn't I tell you? Lay off the milk
and sugar!

Does drinking only two cups mean I will eventually become 2/3 more frail than the old fogeys who drink coffee by the quart? Not if it's as accurate as similar studies I've seen, like the one claiming that coffee prevents dementia. Ask my lifelong coffee-drinking mother how well that turned out. Oh wait, you can't -- she died from complications from dementia! But she lived to be close to 100, so maybe the coffee did some good. Too bad she wasn't cognizant of it at the time. 

Then there was another study that found that one cup of coffee prevented hearing loss by 15%. The catch: only men reaped that benefit. Yes, it's true: coffee is sexist. Flip side: husbands have no reason to claim they didn't hear their wives tell them to take out the garbage. 

No word if cigarettes help or hinder.

And if you're going to follow any of these rules, another study claims you better pour it all down your throat in the morning, because coffee does no damn good after lunch. Have fun when your body crashes at 3:00.

What do all these studies have in common? They're all from Europe. So many different countries, so many different results! 

So here's what American smarty-pants have to say: Java jolters who have one to three cups have a 15% lower risk of dying in the next nine to eleven years. Add a fourth cup and you have a 64% lower chance of "all-cause mortality" than non-drinkers. As I scan the news headlines, I'm not sure which group I want to be part of anymore.

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