When a study came out in 1981 linking coffee to pancreatic cancer in the New England Journal of Medicine, its author, Brian MacMahon, spent the next few days taking seemingly endless phone calls from reporters.
That burst of media attention, he told the Epidemiology Monitor in an interview shortly after, probably had to do with “the fact that it is coffee — it’s almost like apple pie as Americans go — and it gives some of them an opportunity to have a go at the mad scientists who are always finding things that cause cancer.”
MacMahon was right about two things: An attack on a drink so deeply ingrained into our ethos was almost like an attack on America itself. And many were fed up with debates around its alleged risks. He was wrong about the cancer, though — the study’s design turned out to be flawed. A wealth of empirical evidence has since made a strong case for the health benefits of the coffee-drinking habit that no one ever really kicked, anyway.
