Is Coffee Healthy?

A few days ago, I read a LinkedIn post that made me stop.

The author's point was a familiar and perfectly reasonable one.

Why are we often willing to spend money on the things we enjoy, eg, £5 on a coffee, a meal out, a holiday, our hair, fragrance or a handbag, yet hesitate when it comes to spending money on our health?

Her wider message, as I understood it, was about priorities. We readily invest in many parts of our lives, yet can be strangely reluctant to invest in the health that allows us to live them.

I understood the point.

I suspect I have made similar observations myself.

But for some reason, this time one small part of it wouldn't leave me alone.

The coffee.

Why had I accepted so readily that spending £5 on a coffee and spending £5 on my health were two different things?

What if I had that coffee with an old friend?

What if the hour involved conversation, laughter and the simple pleasure of having nowhere else we needed to be?

Had I spent £5 on coffee?

On friendship?

On wellbeing?

On all three?

Perhaps I was already making the question far more complicated than it needed to be.

But once I had noticed it, I couldn't quite put the coffee back where it had been.

Why had I so readily accepted that the coffee and health belonged on opposite sides of the conversation?

 

 

So I did something rather old-fashioned.

I reached for a dictionary.

Not Google. Not PubMed. Not a review paper.

An actual Cambridge Dictionary that has been sitting on my bookshelf for more years than I care to remember.

I looked up healthy.

It is an adjective, defined in terms of possessing or showing good physical and mental wellbeing, being free from disease, or promoting a strong and functional state.

At first, that seemed straightforward enough.

A healthy person.

Someone who is physically and mentally well, functioning well, perhaps free from disease.

But we use the same word rather differently.

A healthy breakfast.

A healthy walk.

A healthy weight.

A healthy lifestyle.

Healthy habits.

None of these things can themselves possess physical or mental wellbeing.

A breakfast cannot be well.

It cannot be unwell either.

So when we call a breakfast healthy, we must be doing something slightly different.

We are making a judgement about what we think it might promote.

And that took me back to the coffee.

Was I asking the wrong question?

Perhaps asking whether coffee is healthy already assumes that “healthy” is something the coffee can possess.

But if what I really mean is whether drinking it might promote physical or mental wellbeing, then surely I need to know rather more.

Who is drinking it?

How much?

How often?

When?

And perhaps even with whom?

The dictionary had answered the question I asked.

Unfortunately, it had given me several more

So I decided to try something easier.

Is running healthy?

Surely.

Three gentle runs a week might improve fitness, lift mood and get someone outside.

What about three runs a day?

What if I have an injured knee?

What if running makes me happy?

What if missing a run makes me anxious?

At some point, apparently, I had managed to turn something healthy into something that might not be.

So running wasn't going to rescue me.

What about lying on the sofa?

That sounds easier.

Not especially healthy.

But what if I am lying there because I have just returned from a ten-mile walk?

What if I have influenza?

What if I am sitting beside someone who needs me?

Same sofa. Same person. Same apparent inactivity.

Something keeps moving.

Perhaps food would be easier.

Is an apple healthy?

This felt promising.

One apple?

Ten?

For whom?

Instead of what?

An apple instead of a chocolate bar is one comparison.

An apple instead of a balanced meal is another.

The apple hadn't changed.

Water?

Surely water would save me.

Is water healthy?

Yes.

How much?

Oh.

Perhaps I needed to retreat to safer professional territory.

I have spent much of my working life in dentistry.

Brushing your teeth is healthy.

There.

Finally.

Except...

How often?

With what?

How hard?

For how long?

What if someone brushes so vigorously that they damage their teeth or gums?

What if brushing has become compulsive?

What if they brush beautifully twice a day but spend the rest of the day repeatedly exposing their teeth to sugar?

I could almost hear some of my dental colleagues preparing their responses.

Well, obviously, it depends...

And there it was.

It depends.

Two wonderfully inconvenient words.

Running depends.

Resting depends.

Eating an apple depends.

Even brushing your teeth depends.

So perhaps the interesting question wasn't whether these things were healthy.

Perhaps it was:

What does “it depends” depend on?

But there was no going back.

“It depends” had left me with another problem.

Depends on what?

So I went back to the coffee.

Imagine it sitting on the table in front of me.

Move in close enough and I can examine what is in the cup.

Coffee.

Water.

Perhaps milk.

Perhaps sugar.

Caffeine.

I could measure quantities. Look at calories. Examine what happens to blood pressure, blood glucose or sleep.

From here, “Is this coffee healthy?” seems to be a question about what is in the cup and what happens inside the body of the person drinking it.

Now move the camera back.

There is a person holding the cup.

Move it back again.

There are two people at the table.

Old friends.

They haven't seen each other for months.

They have been sitting there for an hour.

Talking.

Laughing.

Listening.

The contents of the cup haven't changed.

But the picture has.

Move back again.

Now there is a café.

Other people.

Someone working behind the counter.

A place where people meet.

Move further still and the coffee itself begins to acquire a history.

Someone grew it.

Somewhere.

Land was used.

Water was used.

It travelled.

People were paid, hopefully fairly, along the way.

Every time I moved the camera, something else entered the picture.

And every time something entered the picture, there seemed to be another way of thinking about whether that £5 coffee belonged in a conversation about health.

So where should I stop?

At the cup?

At my body?

At my mind?

At the conversation?

At the café?

At the community?

At the environment in which the coffee was produced?

Surely at some point I must have stopped talking about health.

But where?

And who decided?

Perhaps “it depends” depended partly on something I hadn't noticed before.

Where I had chosen to draw the edge of the picture.

 

Someone was holding it.

Me.

I had decided where to point it.

When to move closer.

When to step back.

And, without really noticing, what stayed inside the picture and what remained outside.

That seemed slightly inconvenient.

So perhaps I should give the camera to someone else.

A cardiologist?

Caffeine. Blood pressure. Heart rate.

A nutritionist?

What's in the cup. What else I eat and drink. How often.

A psychologist?

Why am I drinking it?

Habit?

Pleasure?

Comfort?

Someone interested in social connection?

They might barely notice the coffee.

They might notice the person sitting opposite me.

An economist?

Five pounds.

An ecologist?

Five thousand miles.

Same coffee.

Same table.

Same Tuesday afternoon.

Different picture.

Were any of them wrong?

Perhaps.

But perhaps they were simply standing in different places.

And then I realised I had been doing exactly the same thing throughout this article.

With running, I chose what to look at.

With the sofa, how long to watch.

With the apple, what to compare it with.

With brushing teeth, which consequences mattered.

I hadn't just been observing.

I had been making decisions about how to observe.

That raised a rather uncomfortable possibility.

Perhaps when two people disagree about whether something is healthy, they aren't always disagreeing about the thing itself.

Perhaps sometimes they are looking from different places.

Through different lenses.

For different lengths of time.

With different things inside the frame.

Which made me wonder whether I needed another observer.

Someone standing behind me, watching me move the camera.

Not asking whether the coffee was healthy.

Watching how I decided whether the coffee was healthy.

Of course, that observer would have a problem too.

Someone would be holding their camera.

I decided not to think about that for too long.

After all, I was only trying to buy a coffee.

Nothing about it has changed.

It is still £5.

It is still sitting on the table.

And the author's original observation still seems perfectly reasonable.

We do spend money readily on all sorts of things while sometimes hesitating to invest in our health.

But I am no longer quite as comfortable placing the coffee on one side of the conversation and health on the other.

Perhaps that was what caught my attention in the first place.

Not the coffee.

Not the £5.

The boundary between them.

Somewhere along the way I had accepted that certain things belonged in a box marked health and others belonged somewhere else.

A medical test?

Health.

Exercise?

Health.

A nutritious meal?

Health.

Coffee with an old friend?

Apparently not.

Except now I'm not so sure.

The more I tried to find something that was simply, unquestionably healthy, the more I found myself adding qualifications.

For whom?

How much?

How often?

Instead of what?

Under what circumstances?

Over what period of time?

And viewed from where?

Perhaps “healthy” is doing rather more work than I had realised.

Perhaps when we attach it to a food, a behaviour, a product or a choice, we compress all those questions into one reassuring little adjective.

Healthy.

At which point I should probably tell you what I think it means.

I'm not going to.

Not yet.

Because I'm much more interested in what happens if you try this for yourself.

Think of something you are completely confident is healthy.

Not usually healthy.

Not healthy in moderation.

Something that simply is healthy.

Got one?

Good.

Now make it difficult.

Change the person.

Change the amount.

Change the circumstances.

Watch for longer.

Move closer.

Move further away.

Hand the camera to someone else.

Does your answer survive?

Mine didn't.

It started with a £5 coffee.

And, several questions later, I am left wondering whether the most interesting thing about “healthy” isn't the label itself, but everything we leave unspoken when we use it.

So I'm curious.

Tell me something you are confident is healthy.

Anything.

Food. Exercise. A behaviour. A product. A lifestyle choice. Something completely different.

I'm particularly interested in the examples you think survive all my awkward questions.

And perhaps the most interesting question of all:

What would have to change before you stopped calling it healthy?