One more cup of coffee for the road?

It is time to wake up and smell the coffee — and hear it too, actually — when it comes to the reliability of scientific discoveries. Till a few years ago, those with hearing problems were warned off their daily cuppas of joe as it was said coffee could impact their recovery. So, imagine the confusion of those who followed that advice when a newer study in 2014 claimed exactly the opposite: that rather than caffeine impeding improvement or adversely affecting hearing, drinking coffee may prevent tinnitus, or chronic ringing of the ears and other ailments.

That prognosis, incidentally, was based on a study conducted on 18,000 women. If that made a lot of women shout ‘hear, hear!’, the most recent research now avers that men who drink at least one cup of coffee daily — caffeinated or decaffeinated, filtered or nonfiltered — are some 15% less likely to develop hearing problems but there appears to be no effect at all on women.

Before coffee outlets begin to reimagine themselves as therapeutic centres for aural challenges, researchers and doctors have warned against drinking gallons of coffee just to ward off hearing loss. There are contradictory noises on whether coffee aids weight loss as well. The inescapable message, of course, is that whatever science deems to be true is only valid up to the next ‘discovery’ in that genre.