The office coffee machine is exactly 20 strides from my desk chair — I make the trip a bit too frequently (and gleefully). Or so I assumed. Coffee, that wonderful elixir and productivity booster, the fuel of every editor’s note I have written for this magazine, seemed so good that something about it must be bad.
Reinforced by at least one well-publicized study on how coffee can raise blood pressure, I didn’t doubt that line of thinking, however puritanical. But then biomedicine writer Nathan Seppa pitched a story on the health benefits of coffee. I gave it a thumbs-up before I even heard what those benefits were.