A new study by a University of Scranton professor, Jon Vinson, has found that coffee is the best natural source of the antioxidants that help protect cells in the body from damage caused by unstable molecules known as free radicals. Among other harms, free radicals may cause cancer.

Along with other good news -- that red wine improves cardiovascular health and life expectancy and wards off the common cold; that dark chocolate helps prevent diabetes and lowers blood pressure; that virgin olive oil is not only good for the heart, but fights cancer, diabetes, asthma and arthritis, and obesity, and that garlic, the staff of life, will cure everything from cardiovascular disease to the plague -- I feel blessed to have spent so many years doing the right thing.

Given what she was told, your mother was doing the best she could when she tried to get you to eat your broccoli, but she might have done better to have poured a little vino on your Cocopops.

For it to turn out that java is superior in the antioxidant department to foods such as carrots, collard greens, wheat germ and kale that we have been made to feel guilty our whole lives for not eating is sweet revenge. It only remains for someone to document the incontrovertable health benefits of Häagen-Dazs coffee & almond crunch....

(originally posted to Impractical Proposals 2005-08-30)