Coffee as a Healthful Food

My father is 78 years old; my mother, 72. My mother was weaned on coffee and has never drunk milk. She says it tastes like chalk.

I believe her three or four cups of coffee a day are why she is in better physical shape than my father. My father has prostate cancer (treated), macular degeneration (treated, but slowly getting worse),
diabetes (treated) and has had quintuple-bypass heart surgery.

My mother has none of those health problems. Her main one is that she has smoked since she was about 15 and only recently quit. Her smoking has thinned out her bones and also clogged up her blood vessels.

Coffee contains a fair amount of antioxidants and is also good for your brain, heart, liver and kidneys. I believe all the coffee she has drunk since she was a baby has protected her from the diseases afflicting my father.

When I was a kid I tried to drink her coffee. Ack! She boiled her coffee in one of those aluminum coffee pots with the glass bulb on top. It was horrible.

Years later I found you are not supposed to boil coffee, since it burns the oil. When I bought good coffee and fixed it correctly, I found the difference between good and bad coffee is the difference between Ripple and good wine.

It is of course safe to give children coffee. It’s better than giving them soda, whether with sugar or artificial sweeteners. Incidentally, diabetes was originally called “sugar diabetes,” because sugar is what overwhelmingly causes diabetes. Unfortunately but not unsurprisingly, we have having an explosion of diabetes among children.

Blueberries contains a great many antioxidants, so many that coffee isn’t even in the same league. So what I do is put blueberries in my coffee. Some day I’ll learn how to make blueberry wine.

I only drink one cup of coffee a day, in the morning when I take my dog for a walk. Otherwise I pretty much drink black tea, which also is good for you, the same reason coffee is, although it is far weaker.

I don’t drink much water. After all, let’s remember what W.C. Fields said about water.