What Health Studies on Coffee Miss

baldwin may13 beans post.jpg

Photo by nate steiner/FlickrCC

My Google Alerts on Coffee often bring mundane or obscure references, but yesterday a nugget turned up. It's an article in the Boston Globe, which Corby also commented on, summarizing several of the studies on coffee and its relationship to medical conditions.

I tried to follow a few of the articles back to the full paper, but was unsuccessful. Sometimes the abstract was available free online, but not the full paper--at least in the two I pursued. I am always looking for a definition of "a cup" or "a serving" and the brew strength. As we've discussed, coffee strength varies considerably, and caffeine content varies enormously among coffees.

I'd like researchers to be specific about strength (grams per liter) and caffeine content (if that's presumed to be the important constituent for the study) and serving size.

Another source for peer-reviewed articles on coffee and health is Cosic.org which is funded by a small number of European coffee roasters.

It's mostly happy news. Read carefully, but most of us can enjoy another cup.

Jerry Baldwin is co-founder of Starbucks in Seattle, where he was the first roaster and coffee buyer.