It comes up quite often, "Coffee is bad for you!" or "Caffeine is bad for you!"

Coffee has a long history of being blamed for many illnesses, from "It will stunt your growth" to the claim that it causes heart disease and cancer.

These discussions about coffee are as old as ancient aliens. Well I happened to like my horse meat tenderized so here we go...

Truth is: With coffee you are less likely to have type 2 diabetes, Parkinson's disease, and dementia. Also less chances of certain cancers, heart rhythm problems, and strokes.

Coffee is responsible for changing the world, ending the drunken cowboy days, and bringing us the industrial revolution. Putting down the whiskey and picking up coffee made us so productive in fact, that the government tried banning alcohol consumption. Now prohibition doesn't sound so evil does it? On paper I'm sure it sounded good, but people like their moderate drinking, so we all know how that turned out.

"Coffees growing popularity complemented and sustained the Industrial Revolution, which began in Great Britain during the 1700s and spread to other parts of Europe and North America in the early 1800s. The development of the factory system transformed lives, attitudes, and eating habits. Most people previously had worked at home or in rural craft workshops. They had not divided their time so strictly between work and leisure, and they were largely their own masters. People typically ate five times a day, beginning with soup for breakfast. With the advent of textile and iron mills, there was less time to run a household and cook meals. European lace makers in the early nineteenth century lived almost exclusively on coffee and bread. Because coffee was stimulating and warm it provided an illusion of nutrition. The drink of the aristocracy had become the necessary drug of the masses, and morning coffee replaced beer soup for breakfast." -Uncommon Grounds by Mark Pendergrast

Most people won't agree with me on this, but I like to think of Coffee and Alcohol as Yin and Yang. When it's time to relax, there's nothing like pounding down some cold ones, forgetting about work, and just having a good time. When its time to work, nothing puts a pep in your step like coffee. Also, coffee doesn't last very long in your body, which is excellent. So we drink coffee when we wake up, we drink it through the day, we stop around lunch time and have just enough caffeine left in us to finish up a good work day. Then it's time to relax with some alcohol, or wine with dinner, wind down, pass out, the cycle repeats.

Is consuming nothing at all better? If you think so, then odds are you're some kind of hippie and plan on bringing some other substance into this. We just can't be as motivated and energetic without caffeine as a stimulant. If you think you're hitting your maximum potential with weed, or alcohol, or while frying holes in your brain with pills, then you're an idiot, there's no hope for you, you shouldn't even be reading this. If you know you're not hitting your maximum potential and being as productive as you can possibly be, then why the hell aren't you trying to change it? Oh right.. you didn't drink your coffee.

We all know the rules, and if you don't, you should. Never drink alcohol before noon. Start your day off with a healthy breakfast and some coffee. Drink alcohol only in the evenings or weekends and always remember, you play hard, you pay hard. Two to four glasses of water before you go to sleep is about the best thing you can ever do, it's great for your body, it also makes your morning bright and shiny with no grogginess, hangovers etc...

Try to avoid too much shit in your coffee, coffee is coffee, if you have to load it down with shit so it isn't even recognizable as coffee anymore, then you're doing it wrong. Find a brand of beans you like, and nothing gourmet either. I highly recommend sugar in your coffee though, and I like mine with a little creamer too. Not too much sugar, just enough to taste it. Sugar gives you an excellent boost of energy but too much at once makes your body produce too much insulin to counter it, which is why people experience the afternoon crash.

Don't take sleep aids. If you need them, then you're drinking too much coffee, or you're too stressed. Find ways of relaxing.

A lot of people I know smoke weed, but not one of them is productive. Ooooo That stung a little didn't it? It's just not possible, but that doesn't mean you have to quit, it just means you have to be so disciplined that you can toke up only in the evenings when you've accomplished all of the day's goals. Sounds easy? I've never known one smoker that was able to do it.

What about energy drinks? Tough one. See the ingredients vary a lot between different drinks. Some are better than others. Monster for example is theoretically fine. Technically there's nothing in Monster Energy Drinks thats necessarily bad for you. I know, I was surprised too.

So just how bad is coffee for you? Well let's list a few side effects:
Antioxidant Rich - coffee, due to its high caffeine content, is a great source of antioxidants. Antioxidants are cancer preventative and help fight the negative affects of aging.
Magnesium Rich - unfortunately studies have proven that many American's are magnesium deficient, a mineral necessary to many of the enzymes in your body in order to catalyze reactions.
Anti Bacterial and Anti Adhesive Qualities - Italian researchers discovered this interesting little fact as they were conducting experiments regarding their favorite national drink that was getting a bad rep by health researchers ("them"). Practically speaking, this means that coffee is proven to prevent cavities, provided you don't dump an ocean of sugar into your drink.
Promotes Digestion - because coffee is a diuretic, it generally speaking, sends people straight to the bathroom. When I was doing my research for IBS articles, although some doctors claimed coffee may irritate the stomach, other doctors recommended it as one of the natural tricks to "help move things along" and prescribed drinking a cup or two a day.
Improves Athletic Endurance and Performance - Believe it or not, coffee has recently been labeled a "controlled" substance for athletes participating in the Olympic Games due to the unfair performance advantages large amounts of the drink provides. Coffee has proven to increase athletic endurance as well as general coordination and performing abilities in serious athletes.
Decreases Depression - studies conducted on school age children in Brazil demonstrated that children who drank a cup of coffee before going to school had a much lower instance of depression later in life than those who didn't drink coffee.
Decreases Your Chances of Developing Parkinson's Disease - 6 separate studies conducted by researchers have proven that people who drink large amounts of coffee on a regular basis are 80% less likely to develop Parkinson's disease then those that don't.
Decreases Your Risk of Developing Colon Cancer - studies have shown that people who drink 2 cups of coffee on a regular basis have a 25% reduced risk of developing colon cancer.
Offsets the Damaging Effects of Smoking - coffee has proven to offset some of the negative side effects of heavy smokers, such as heart disease and liver damage.
Treats Asthma and Headaches - asthma and headache medicines contain large doses of caffeine in them due to the substance's ability to treat their symptoms. The caffeine found in coffee, although present in smaller amounts, has proven to have the same positive affects on alleviating headaches and treating asthma.
Reduces Your Risk of Liver Disease - studies have shown that people who drink 2 cups of coffee on a daily basis have an 80% reduced risk rate of developing liver cirrhosis
So it's good for me AND it makes me get off my ass!? Holy sweet penus!

Let's follow coffee's epic journey:
Prior to 1000 AD. Galla tribe in Ethiopia realize that they get an energy high from eating ground up coffee cherry.  This tasty snack was a far cry from your traditional modern brew: They would roll up cherry grinds with animal fat into little pasty energy balls, useful for a bit of buzz before a big battle or long march.
1000 Arab traders bring coffee to their homeland and begin cultivating it.  They boil the beans to create a drink known as qahwa (that which prevents sleep).
1453. Ottoman Turks bring coffee to Constantinople, and historys first coffee shop, named Kiva Han, is opened. Wherever Islam spread, coffee came along as well.  However, the Arabians were clever in their exportation scheme: to prevent importers from growing the bean themselves, they made the beans infertile by parching or boiling them.
1600.Baba Budan, an Indian pilgrim-smuggler is said to be the first to bring fertile seeds outside of Arabia or Africa, by strapping them to his belly.  
1615. Venetian trader brings coffee to the West.  Pope Clement VIII, though initially lobbied to ban the infidels (the Ottoman Empire) favourite drink, chooses to baptize the beverage, making it acceptable for guilt-free Christian consumption.
1616.  The Dutch are the first to smuggle an entire coffee plant into Europe.
1607. When founding the colony of Virginia, some believe that Captain John Smith brought coffee to North America for the first time.
1652. England opens its first coffee house.  Many follow, and soon their popularity rises to the point they are dubbed penny universities--a penny being the price of a coffee, and the discussion among patrons rivalling those among enrolled university students.
1683. Turks fleeing Vienna after a battle leave behind bags of coffee, which are claimed as spoils by a Polish military officer, Franciszek Jerzy Kulczycki.  With it, he opens central Europes first coffee house, and begins the custom of filtering out grounds, adding a sprinkling of sugar and a dash of milk to the popular drink.  This achievement has been recognized in many a modern Viennese coffeehouse by hanging a picture of Kulczycki in the window.
1690. The Dutch smuggle a coffee plant from the Arab port of Mocha.  They become the first to cultivate it commercially, doing so both in Ceylon and their East Indian colony, Java.  Think link provides the source of one of coffees popular nicknames: mocha java.
1717.  The Dutch show off their coffee wealth, and give a plant to Louis XIV for Pariss  Royal Botanical Garden, the Jardin des Plantes.  A little while later, a naval officer named Gabriel Mathieu de Clieu, was set to leave for Martinique. Thinking that he could turn Martinique into the next Java, he asked the king for a clipping of the coffee plant.  Permission was promptly denied, so de Clieu stole into the Jardin des Plantes hothouse in the dead of night, and stole a sprig. A perilous, pirate-filled, water-rationing trip over the Atlantic later (during which time de Cleu shared his water ration with his beloved plant), De Cleus coffee seedling would be the starting gene for 18 million trees in around 50 years, enough to supplu all of Latin America.
1727: Taking note of this fertile market, Brazil wants a slice of the coffee pie.  They send in Lt. Col. Francisco De Melo Palheta to French Guiana. Col. Palheta has his own personal strategy to get his hands on a priceless coffee seedling: the governor of French Guianas wife. He charms her into giving him a bouquet topped with a few fertile springs at a farewell dinner, and by the 1800s, Brazil virtually controls the coffee market, expanding supply to the point of turning this exclusive beverage into the common mans drink.
1773. The Boston Tea Party makes drinking coffee a patriotic duty in America.
1907: Brazil accounts for 97% of the world's harvest.
1946: In Italy, the espresso machine is perfected by Achilles Gaggia. The deep brown colour of the robes of Capuchin-order monks, give this refined version of the brew its name, cappuccino.
2012: In your fuckin pie hole you lazy maggot.