My Advice To You Is To Start Drinking Heavily

The Benefits of Solid Research

Raise your income by drinking a whooooole lot of this.

Coffee or green tea?

The question used to make that angel-devil combo pop up on my shoulders.

"Green tea is sooooo much healthier," my angel would coo. "AND it's traditional." She'd drag out that last word in her sweet sarcasm that makes me want to punch her in her cherub.

"The coffee," my devil would growl, like he already knew he was going to win. "Coffee milk coffee sugar coffee coffee coffee!!"

I used to listen to my angel much more often. I blame the kids.

Thanks to the findings of this new study the sides of my conscience don't have to argue anymore.





Drinking Coffee, Green Tea Lowers Health Risks, Study Suggests

Yes, according to Japan’s National Cancer Center, "a study of about 90,000 people aged between 40 and 69 suggests that regularly drinking the beverages may lower health risks including death from heart and cerebrovascular diseases."

Wow, 90,000 subjects. That's a pretty reliable sample size.

The article goes on to explain how "the cancer center and the University of Tokyo followed the drinking habits and health of the people for an average period of 19 years in the study, which started in 1990."

Hot dog, 19 years! These people are mighty patient and thorough. And we can assume, nicely funded.

"The participants only supplied their coffee and green tea drinking habits at the beginning of the study."

WHAT?? Chotto matte, patient and thorough National Cancer Center people. You asked 90,000 people what they drank the day before, checked in on them 19 years later and now you proudly "suggest" my angel-devil team can just turn in their wings and their pitchforks?

If this is what passes for research then allow me to proudly suggest a few of my own findings.

Eating baby food contributes to the development of better speech. It's true. Millions of people I've observed speaking ingested baby food when they were infants. And here's the amazing thing: it didn't matter whether it was strained peas, pureed carrots or Puppy Chow even. All these things have resulted in greatly enhanced communication abilities over the subsequent years. Many subjects can write with a pencil too, but I am waiting on additional funding to carry out that aspect of my research.

Playing with Legos increases height. There is a clear link here. People who can recall playing with those little pieces of molded plastic magic assure me that they were much shorter back then than they are now. The evolution of the Lego sets tied into such outside brands as Spiderman, Disney and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles may have induced further growth in both the height of the subjects and - in a surprise finding - the levels of credit card debt incurred by their parents.


Expose your shrimpy kid to some of this and watch him grow like a weed.

Binge drinking leads to increased income. This is what I have found as a keen observer of my friends, dormitory mates and fellow rugby thugs from my university days. All of them, even those who only went on the occasional bender, now have significantly higher incomes than they did when we were tipping over campus police golf carts and swinging on the flagpole lanyards at 3am. The correlation is not a perfect 100%, however, if I include myself in the results.

Owning a car lowers travel time. This one was harder to pin down since I can not count how many times I have beaten my wife home on my bicycle. Variables like parking lot gridlock, traffic lights, construction zones and one-way streets, none of which matter to me when I am flying along on two wheels, are proven links between driving a car and increased travel time. But the trend seems to favor driving over walking. Except for the binge drinkers.

Playing Parcheesi is fatal. This is a sad but true fact. Of the 739,902 seniors observed playing board games like Parcheesi or backgammon or even checkers in old folks' homes all across the country, all of them were found to have passed away 19 years later when I checked in on them. Except for Mrs. Hashimoto. She was still breathing away in her chair.

Must have been all the green tea.