Recent research shows that coffee addiction is more like our addiction to water or oxygen than our addiction to alcohol or tobacco.

While I have long touted coffee as the only viable migraine medicine I’ve found to date (when taken in regular daily doses as a prophylactic), much popular “wisdom” has lambasted caffeine and coffee generally as some sort of health risk.

It should be noted, of course, that the only discernible negative health impact anyone seems able to cite (even in the above article) are issues with sleeping. Which, uh, look at the poster. Sleep would be best if eliminated altogether and has certainly never done me any favors.

It must also be said that while I like the results of this particular study, the practice of trying to isolate particular foods and beverages for their health impacts in scientific studies is probably best categorized alongside reading tea leaves or ancient runes. After all, most research tends to bob back and forth between “red wine will kill you by the time you turn 35” and “red wine will guarantee that you live to 100”.

The underlying reality is that everything one ingests involves trade-offs, which pertains to medicines as much as it does to food. And coming to understand these trade-offs is interesting, but probably very hard to universalize. Individual bodies are remarkably different and we will all always be our best diagnostician, if we’re paying attention and staying informed. After all, coffee causes migraines for some people and my grandmother smoked a pack to three a day from age 16 to 91.

Your homework: figure out how much 1-3 packs a day for 75 years costs in 2010 dollars.

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