![How Coffee Drank Soda’s Milkshake
Ten years ago, Americans drank enough soda every year to fill a small aquarium. Fifty-three gallons of the stuff per person. That’s half a liter of Diet Coke on an average day. Compare that to our other favorite liquid-caffeine companion. For every cup of coffee we consumed in 2003, we drank two cups of soft drink. For $1 we spent on joe, we spent $4 on soda.
Now look where we are: Soda is in a free fall, with domestic revenue down 40%. Coffee culture is ascendant, up 50% in ten years. In another decade, the United States could easily spend more on coffee than soda — something utterly unthinkable at the turn of the century.
Read more. [Image: IBISWorld]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/a2ee8ae9da955f1930403ba87db81dcb/tumblr_mgu09b8ac81qcokc4o1_1280.png)
How Coffee Drank Soda’s Milkshake
Ten years ago, Americans drank enough soda every year to fill a small aquarium. Fifty-three gallons of the stuff per person. That’s half a liter of Diet Coke on an average day. Compare that to our other favorite liquid-caffeine companion. For every cup of coffee we consumed in 2003, we drank two cups of soft drink. For $1 we spent on joe, we spent $4 on soda.
Now look where we are: Soda is in a free fall, with domestic revenue down 40%. Coffee culture is ascendant, up 50% in ten years. In another decade, the United States could easily spend more on coffee than soda — something utterly unthinkable at the turn of the century.
Read more. [Image: IBISWorld]
![The Case for Drinking as Much Coffee as You Like
“Coffee and caffeine have been inexorably intertwined in our thinking, but truth is coffee contains a whole lot of other stuff with biological benefits,” said Martin. And most concerns about caffeine’s negative effects on the heart have been dispelled. In June, a meta-analysis of ten years of research went so far as to find an inverse association between habitual, moderate consumption and risk of heart failure. The association peaked at four cups per day, and coffee didn’t stop being beneficial until subjects had increased their daily consumption to beyond ten cups.
Read more. [Image: Flickr]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_meb6vqpoXq1qcokc4o1_1280.jpg)
![Coffee: Preventing Scurvy Since 1650
In 1650, St. Michael’s Alley, London’s first coffee shop, placed an ad in a newspaper. That ad — archived in the British Museum, and Internet-ed by the Vintage Ads LiveJournal — extolled the many Vertues of the newly discovered beverage. Which “groweth upon little Trees, only in the Deserts of Arabia,” and which is — despite and ostensibly because of its Vertues — “a simple innocent thing.”
What’s amazing about the ad — besides, obviously, its crazy claim that coffee can prevent Mif-carryings in Child-bearing Women — is how flagrantly its copyrighters flung the Vertues they extol. Per these 17th-century Mad Men, coffee could be used to aid and/or prevent: indigestion, headaches, lethargy, drowsiness, arthritis, sore eyes, cough, consumption, “spleen,” dropsy, gout, scurvy, and — my personal favorite — hypochondria.
Read more. [Image: British Museum]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m79bdhhpm41qcokc4o1_1280.jpg)
![NIH Study: Coffee Really Does Make You Live Longer
Caffeine addicts, rejoice: all the coffee you’re downing over the course of a day could be lengthening your lifespan. For real.
According to research published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, people who drank four or five cups of coffee a day tended to live longer than those who drank only a cup or less. The benefit was more pronounced for women, but men also stand to gain somewhat from pounding joe.
Read more. [Image: antwerpenR/Flickr]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m4504paZxp1qcokc4o1_1280.jpg)
![Coffee May Actually Make Us Healthier
In a study published Tuesday in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, a group of Harvard researchers announced that they’d found that coffee consumption actually reduces the risk of prostate cancer, and particularly lethal prostate cancer, in men. Not only that, but a Swedish study published last week in Breast Cancer Research indicates that coffee could also help reduce a woman’s risk for post-menopausal, ER-negative breast cancer.
All of that is in addition to other recent studies that have found links between coffee consumption and a decreased risk of gallstones, type 2 diabetes, and Parkinson’s disease, as well as lower rates of disease progression in liver cancer and cirrhosis. Other recent studies have indicated that coffee may not even increase a person’s risk of heart disease or stroke. Turns out that coffee contains antioxidants and compounds that can improve glucose metabolism and insulin secretion. It also seems to have an effect on sex hormones, which is why researchers looked at its impact on prostate and breast cancer.
Read more at The Atlantic
[Image: kennymatic/flickr]](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_llg5ywsTTL1qcokc4o1_1280.jpg)
