Reading the Coffee Beans

By Bernadine Healy, M.D.
U.S.News & World Report

No matter where you get your news--TV, daily paper, website, magazine, or radio--the media are choked with conflicting medical information. From low-fat diets to hormones, chocolate milk to pain relievers, calcium to vitamin pills, readers are confused. There may be no greater offender than the mixed messages that pour in regularly about what some consider America's national beverage--coffee. On this score, last week's report in the Journal of the American Medical Association on the purported link between coffee drinking and heart attacks is a godsend. For this article serves up coffee as a model for consumers in making sense of much of the health news that seems at odds.

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