Comeback Time For Coffee

Can it be true this time? After all the up-and-down reviews that coffee has received from medical researchers over the years, is it now possible to savor the dark brew without pangs of guilt? Can it really be that an energizing jolt of java, so good for the soul, is not bad for the body either?

That is the momentous implication of the latest in an interminable line of coffee studies. It is tempting to pay attention to this one, published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine, since it represents a large-scale research effort and bears the prestigious stamp of the Harvard School of Public Health. The school's investigators studied 45,589 men aged 40 to 75 years, some of whom averaged six or more cups of coffee daily. (As is too often the case in medical research, women were left out of the study.) The finding: these coffee drinkers were no more susceptible to strokes or heart attacks than anybody else. The results could ease the minds of the 100 million or so Americans who drink an average of 3 1/2 cups a day. "This is a very important study," says cardiologist Francois Abboud, president of the American Heart Association. "From a public-health standpoint, we cannot advise people to stop drinking coffee."

Even this report, however, has its ambiguities. The researchers found that the people in the study who drank four or more cups of decaffeinated coffee a day had a slightly higher risk of coronary heart disease. That's puzzling because caffeine has generally been fingered as the most noxious ingredient in coffee. The report's authors caution that the slim evidence against decaf may be a statistical fluke.

But what about all the other studies that have tentatively linked coffee not only to heart attacks but also to calcium loss, pancreatic cancer, colon cancer, increased cholesterol levels, birth defects and difficulty in getting pregnant, to say nothing of damage to computer keyboards and silk neckties? Though some of these investigations have been superseded by contrary research, it is virtually impossible for anyone -- expert or layman -- to sort them all out.

The Harvard report, in short, will suffice until the next study indicating that a paper cup of coffee is more salutary than coffee drunk from a mug. Or that coffee is good till the last drop dead.