Research findings are a source of much merriment for me and some of my online friends, especially when scientists blithely overturn the “important findings” they had announced just a few days earlier: telling us, for example, that red wine is really excellent for the heart (because a group of mice under observation in the lab clocked up extra miles on their little cross-trainers after having a few glasses), and then subsequently going oh no, wait a minute, it turns out that red wine leads directly to heart attacks (those mice weren’t cycling fast because of increased energy levels, they were merely in their death throes and reflexive limb action was occurring).
Coffee being one of the most important things in my life, I spend a lot of time reading about caffeine research, and there were several new items this week. To name but two: “Coffee may reduce the risk of developing diabetes by 25 per cent” (http://tinyurl.com/yzsno6e) and “Oops, caffeine doesn’t sober people who have consumed alcohol — in fact, it may be even more dangerous for their daily functioning” (http://tinyurl.com/ygesj4x). Apparently lab-mice are crashing their dinky cars with alarming regularity after mixing booze with coffee beans. It even makes them so absent-minded they forget to strap their seat-belts.
Naturally these findings have greatly distressed those of us who wish to reduce their diabetes risk but who also want to drive about in a heavily drunken condition with impunity. (Or, as a blogger named PrincessNanse puts it, in a different context, “Now we can have small boobs and no diabetes or big boobs and diabetes.”) On an email group yesterday I played a rotating game where the participants had to come up with progressively wackier “research findings” involving coffee. The first member of the group began by observing that people who drink coffee are more likely to ingest ground coffee beans than those who don’t. “After careful observation of mice,” said another, “it has been concluded that people who fall into jars containing coffee beans will find it a slippery business to claw their way out, especially if their toe-nails have been clipped. Only 65 per cent of them will eventually succeed.”
We finished by agreeing that there is a strong positive correlation between drinking more than six cups of black coffee per day and wasting time playing stupid group games on email. You can read the official report in next month’s National Science Journal. Then we logged off thinking we had been sufficiently creative, but the real world has beaten us to the punch yet again. Apparently, British researchers have found that “serial coffee drinkers are more likely to feel the presence of dead people — or to report seeing or hearing things that were not there”.
“Studies like these always bug me,” a Time Wellness blog commenter says of the diabetes story (http://tinyurl.com/yeexdeq), “Some people take these results and run in the wrong direction — now they have a misguided excuse to go to Starbucks and overdose on pumpkin spice lattes. Wouldn’t it be more beneficial to just drop high-cal, high-fat, high-carb coffees altogether?” But then, using new information or misinformation to rationalise bad habits is a common human failing.
On Health Kicker (http://tinyurl.com/-y8dwdfw) there’s a discussion about whether drinking coffee aids in weight loss (yet another research finding) and a poster agrees that it does, “but only because if I have any form of caffeine I get really hyper for a little while and then just crash, no matter what time of day — so I forget to eat”. Now you know why excessive coffee intake could be the solution to all of the world’s ills.