Does your coffee have powers like Popeye’s spinach? Do you need Morning Mud to start the day? Do you guzzle java like a TV cop on a stakeout?
Coffee. It has a lot of aliases like jitter juice, rocket fuel, cup of jolt, and cupped lightening. That’s no surprise when over one billion people around the world down the stuff each day. Americans alone drink 400 million cups daily, 146 billion cups yearly, or an average three cups a day. But America isn’t number one in that category – Finland, the Netherlands, and Sweden take that title.
How about you?
Consider these infamous coffee drinkers:
*President Teddy Roosevelt drank up to a gallon of coffee a day, adding 5-7 lumps of sugar for each cup.
*Napoleon asked for a spoonful of coffee on his deathbed.
*Thomas Jefferson called coffee “the favorite drink of the civilized world.”
A few centuries ago, some people believed coffee was the drink of the devil, unfit for children, women, and men who worried about their virility. So coffee lover Johan Sebastian Bach composed a tasty comedic opera in 1735 called The Coffee Cantata.
Father sir, but do not be so harsh!
If I couldn’t, three times a day,
be allowed to drink my little cup of coffee,
in my anguish I will turn
into a shriveled-up roast goat.
Although not many Americans turned into shriveled-up roasted goats, coffee had a tough rap in the states. Rumors of bad health thrived but were ignored. Everyone freely continued to drink their jitter juice, hoping for better news. Finally, things changed.
America announced that their favorite brew is healthy!
You just have to watch what you put into it, like cream, sugar, and shots of Irish whiskey. Recent research links coffee to protection against diabetes, Parkinson’s, skin cancer, liver disease, and depression. In a recent study, The New England Journal of Medicine, found that 50-71 year olds who drank 4-5 cups a day live longer than their non-coffee-drinking peers.
It all began in Ethiopia, Sudan, and Kenya where the coffee plant was native. One popular legend says that an 11th century goat herder from the Kingdom of Kaffa noticed his flock got very lively after eating some red berries. He decided to try them and discovered he was as happy as his goats.
