Harger: Coffee was going to kill you. Now five cups a day is heart-healthy. Check back in five years

Look in your kitchen cabinet. Somewhere in there, behind the vitamins you stopped taking, is a bottle of fish oil. You don’t remember buying it. You don’t remember why you bought it. Somebody told you it was good for you and you believed them, which is apparently the only qualification anybody needs.

They’re telling us something different about fish oil now. I’ll get to that.

The American Heart Association (AHA) came out Monday and said five cups of coffee a day is safe for most adults. It’s in the scientific journal Circulation, and the doctor who ran the review, Gregory Marcus at UCSF, said three to five cups is linked to a lower risk of heart disease, stroke, heart failure, and diabetes.

Five cups. In this city, that’s a slow morning.

Now the fine print, because there’s always fine print. The AHA means coffee without added sugars or fillers, so the venti caramel situation you’ve got going doesn’t count. And the statement warns that higher doses, like the levels in energy drinks and energy shots, may cause cardiovascular harm. Coffee good. The tall can with the lightning bolt on it, bad.

Coffee is the least of it. In one lifetime we’ve been told to eat eleven servings of bread a day, throw out the butter, drink red wine for our hearts and then quit drinking altogether, and treat an egg yolk like a small explosive. Every one of those came with credentials attached. Every one got reversed by somebody else with credentials.

The science was mostly doing what science does. The headlines were the problem, and they still are. That’s how a narrow study about mice turns into a warning about the bottle in your medicine cabinet, and how nicotine gets quietly sold back to us as a focus aid.

Why is it that the government told us to eat eleven servings of bread?

The food pyramid. Remember that thing? Bread and pasta and rice at the bottom, and they wanted us to eat six to eleven servings a day. Eleven. Fats and oils went way up at the pointy part, where you could barely see them, and we were told to use those sparingly.

So we ate the bread. We felt good about ourselves eating the bread.

Then they took the pyramid down. Fat is fine now. Bread is the problem now.

Health advice in this country zigzags like a toddler chasing seagulls at Alki Beach.

Did you ever notice nobody apologizes for the butter?

Coffee was going to kill you. High blood pressure. Dehydration. Acid in a cup. That was the whole story for years, and now the American Heart Association is practically running a punch card program.

Red wine was terrible. Then it was medicine. There was a thing called the French Paradox, and it was on the cover of magazines, and grown adults started drinking Merlot at night for their hearts. Now the World Health Organization (WHO) said there’s no safe level of alcohol at all. None. Zero. The corkscrew giveth, the corkscrew taketh away.

Eggs were going to clog your arteries. The yolk was a yellow grenade. Now they’re an excellent source of high-quality protein, and the only thing between you and a heart-healthy breakfast is the price of the 60-pack at Costco.

Then there’s butter. Butter was poison. Switch to margarine, they told us, and that was a full public health campaign with commercials and a tub of something called Promise in every refrigerator in America. Then margarine turned out to be loaded with trans fats, which were worse than the thing we’d stopped eating. So butter’s back. And now people put it in their coffee, which means two separate substances that were once going to kill us have been combined into a wellness beverage.

Diet Coke used to be the responsible choice, the thing you ordered to balance out the burger. Now people call them fridge cigs. The WHO classified aspartame as a possible carcinogen, and studies have linked artificial sweeteners to gut problems and increased cravings. Rough stretch for a drink whose entire personality was being the healthy one.

Now about that fish oil in your cabinet

Fish oil capsules were the supplement aisle’s golden child. Good for your heart, your brain, your joints, your general sense of having your life together.

Then this spring, researchers at the Medical University of South Carolina published a study finding that EPA, one of the two main omega-3s in that capsule, may interfere with the brain’s ability to repair itself after repeated head injuries. In mice. With supporting tissue analysis from human CTE cases. DHA, the other omega-3 in the same capsule, showed no such effect. And the researchers said plainly that their findings don’t negate the known cardiovascular benefits of fish oil.

That is the actual finding, and it is considerably more boring than the headlines it generated, which is rather the point.

We have figured out how to put protein into a gummy bear

Protein shakes, protein bars, protein cereal, protein ice cream, protein water. Somebody looked at a glass of water and thought, this could use more protein.

How much you want to bet that in five years, someone publishes a study saying too much protein is destroying our kidneys?

Philip Morris would like you to know that nicotine is good for you

I’ve lived long enough to see this one come all the way around.

Wellness influencers are pushing nicotine pouches and nicotine gum as a focus aid rather than a quitting aid. Philip Morris International’s chief told Axios that nicotine has “certain cognitive benefits,” and the company’s own website said it may improve attention, memory, and fine motor function. That’s a tobacco company telling you nicotine is good for your brain, which is a thing tobacco companies have said before.

Tech companies are putting vending machines full of the stuff in their offices. Zyn shipments in this country went from 6 million cans in 2018 to 334 million in 2023.

We spent 50 years and a fortune getting people to quit. Now it’s in the breakroom.

My completely unscientific, deeply unqualified health advice

It’s exhausting. All of it.

I don’t have a medical degree. I do know science is supposed to evolve, and that’s the whole job. The problem is we treat every new study like a verdict, and the media, me included, can’t resist a headline announcing that the thing you enjoy is secretly killing you. Or saving you. Depending on the year.

So: everything in moderation. Eat a vegetable once in a while. Go for a walk. Don’t smoke, no matter what a guy with 200,000 TikTok followers tells you about neuroplasticity.

And maybe stop reading headlines about what’s going to kill you. The stress alone can’t be good for your heart.

Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here. 

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