Drinking coffee offers no real benefit, say eggheads

Deluded academics in the UK and Germany have produced "research" purporting to show that coffee drinkers receive no tangible benefit from their morning cup of beautiful, life-giving beany caffeine goodness.

The foolishness was presided over by Peter Rogers of Bristol Uni's experimental psycho department. He and his allied truth-deniers wrote:

Although frequent consumers feel alerted by caffeine, especially by their morning tea, coffee, or other caffeine-containing drink, evidence suggests that this is actually merely the reversal of the fatiguing effects of acute caffeine withdrawal.

According to Reuters:

The team asked 379 adults - half of them non/low caffeine consumers and the other half medium/high caffeine consumers - to give up caffeine for 16 hours, and then gave them either caffeine or a dummy pill known as a placebo.

Spurious "measurements" then seemed to indicate that the upstanding, coffee-swilling group who got lovely, brain- and wit-enhancing delicious caffeine showed "alertness" levels no higher than the decaf-glugging weirdoes who got a placebo.

Rogers and his fellow lunatics contend that the revivifying morning cup offers no more than a return to normal performance in the case of a regular caffeine hound, who they argue is generally a twitching wreck following a night's abstinence. Or, as they put it:

With frequent consumption, substantial tolerance develops to the anxiogenic effect of caffeine, even in genetically susceptible individuals, but no net benefit for alertness is gained, as caffeine abstinence reduces alertness and consumption merely returns it to baseline.

The full paper can be read by subscribers to the journal Neuropsychopharmacology here. ®