Enjoy a cup of coffee every morning? No worries. Enjoy more than four per day? Well, you have some worries then, especially if you’re under fifty-five.
According to a study published in Mayo Clinician Proceedings, those who consumed more than twenty-eight cups of coffee per week were twenty one per cent more likely to die; amongst those under the age of fifty-five, that risk jumped fifty per cent.
How serious was the study? It followed 43,727 people between the ages of twenty and eighty seven over the course of seventeen years. Researchers defined a cup as between six and eight ounces (a Starbucks “grande” is sixteen ounces, and a Tim Horton’s medium is fourteen ounces), and dryly note that, in the light of these findings, younger people should perhaps avoid heavy coffee consumption.
The study comes with caveats, however. Researchers merely note that there is a link between heavy coffee consumption and early death; they don’t know why this is the case, or even that excessive amounts of coffee is the mechanism causing early death.
Our solution? Coffee in the morning, Scotch in the afternoon. Problem solved!
