The following Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Mark Sisson

and is narrated by Tina Lehman.

The Definitive Guide to Coffee

Coffee is serious business. We Americans drink about 400 million cups of it and spend several billion dollars on it each year.

It's the most popular drug on earth, and certainly the most socially acceptable.

In many ways, coffee's the closest thing we've got to a universal daily ritual, as just about

every morning, billions of people across the planet prostrate themselves before the holy,

energy-giving legume.

It also hails from the same place the earliest members of our species do, East Africa,

Ethiopia to be exact. That the most industrious animal ever to walk the planet

and the psychoactive legume that fuels said industry both hail from the same place on Earth is pure poetry.

Coffee's also delicious. I'd say you'd have to pry my coffee from my cold dead fingers,

only the ensuing struggle would slosh

it all onto the floor, and that would be such a waste. Yet it's also considered to be a vice.

One of those substances that everyone knows is bad for you. Is it? Before I get into the evidence,

let's give the ending away early. It's probably good for most of you.

And yeah, I'm biased as hell. So what? It's based on considerable evidence and you likely share

the same pro-coffee bias. The majority of the evidence in favor of coffee consists of epidemiological

studies, making observations of and gathering data from large populations.

These cannot establish causation, but the trend is clear. It seems to be good for us.

Breast cancer. Consumption of caffeinated coffee, but not decaf, has a protective effect on postmenopausal

breast cancer risk.

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