Coffee need not be a guilty pleasure, study shows

If you don't enjoy coffee, or if it bothers you, don't drink it. But if you consider coffee to be one of life's pleasures, perhaps you will be interested in some of the latest findings about coffee's health effects, as reported in Harvard's Women's Health Watch. We're talking here about regular coffee, with its full content of caffeine, not decaffeinated coffee.

We now have 20 years of reassuring research to calm the fears caused by some flawed studies of the past, but many folks still consider their coffee to be a guilty pleasure. Certainly coffee isn't totally innocuous, but in moderation, that means a few cups a day, coffee is now judged to be a safe drink.

Caffeine is a mildly addictive stimulant. Getting too much may give you the jitters, keep you awake at night and make you irritable. If you're a regular coffee drinker and you miss your morning dose, you may get a terrible headache as a withdrawal symptom, but for most people, coffee in moderation is harmless. There are, however, some potential side effects we ought to look at.

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