LatinosUSA

Well, that’s a good question. I think the more, the better, but a few bloggers know that I reach my limit when my left eye starts twitching. When that happens, I usually stop drinking until the next day.

I read a good article with the same title in The Economist that discusses the subject. It seems like every now and then, someone will write an article about how much coffee—or wine, for that matter—we should drink to stay within healthy limits. I know my limit for coffee, and since I don’t typically drink wine, it’s one less thing to worry about.

Before going into the amount that the article states as the limit, let me give you a brief history of coffee and my own habits.

Anecdotally, coffee originated around the 9th century in Ethiopia, but historical evidence supports that coffee cultivation and trade began in Yemen around the mid-15th century. Around the same time, Sufi monks (practitioners of Sufism, a mystical branch of Islam) were brewing coffee for religious rituals.¹

In Puerto Rico, where I’m from, coffee was introduced around 1736 by Spanish colonists—probably from Martinique or Santo Domingo. Our coffee is mainly cultivated in the mountainous towns of Yauco, Adjuntas, Utuado, and Lares because of the fertile volcanic soil and cool elevations.²

I’m biased, of course, and I think Puerto Rico produces the best coffee in the world. The photo below shows my favorite brands.

I usually order these online and pay $6.65 for Yaucono and $5.70 for Crema.³ I drink a lot of coffee from these 14-ounce bags, and it’s definitely way cheaper than your typical Starbucks Americano. I don’t do fancy coffee, so black with little or no sugar is my way to go.

When I was in the military, 6 or 7 cups were my normal, which resulted in the occasional eye twitching. Now I’m at about 4 cups a day (early morning, mid-morning, after lunch, and before dinner) with no eye twitching for the past two years. And when I say cups, I really mean 12-ounce mugs.

The amount of coffee I drink daily is close enough to the recommendation from the article and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration: 400 milligrams per day⁴, or roughly 4–5 cups (8 ounces each).

The article says that some components of coffee can reduce inflammation, there is some suggestion that it can fend off cancer, and apparently, one study by the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm reported that post-menopausal women who claimed to drink 3 to 4 cups of coffee per day were significantly less likely to develop breast cancer.⁵ And we all know that caffeine is a stimulant and that coffee combats tiredness.

I’m not sure about all those benefits, and science will continue investigating to confirm or deny such findings. I drink coffee because it’s awesome, and I’ve been drinking it since I was 14 years old, maybe even before that.

Not sure if reading this post stimulated your coffee neurons or not, but I can tell you it stimulated mine, and with that, I’m going for my last cup of the day. Drink up, my friends.

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1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee#History ↩︎
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffee_production_in_Puerto_Rico ↩︎
3. https://prcoffee.com/ground-coffee/ ↩︎
4. https://www.fda.gov/consumers/consumer-updates/spilling-beans-how-much-caffeine-too-much ↩︎
5. https://breast-cancer-research.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/bcr2879 ↩︎