my café’s au lait, fin d’histoire

Always been a mite sensitive to animadversions on my fave indulgences, such as coffee-imbibing and dairy product-scoffing. Eg as a chronic bronchitic, I’ve been advised from time to time by chronic experts (not including doctors) that if I gave up the white stuff my phlegmy webs would soon dissolve away. Then the medical profession was swept up in findings that dairy’s role in phlegm production is more or less precisely zero, and this repeated to me by my local GP only a few months ago, to my great satisfaction. Now I’m told, by someone who loves discovering new diets, that, no, that’s all bullshit, dairy is the cuprit. Cow’s milk, they reckon, is a real worry, what with caseine and all. Caseine? Do I really want to know?
The same person has often been on at me about my coffee-drinking. All that coffee just can’t be good. Well, as far as I know, they’ve not been able to pin anything particularly nasty on this wonderdrug. What’s more, a recent New Scientist article reports that it may reduce the risk of liver cancer. Apparently a big study in Japan (ten years, 90,000 people) has found that regular coffee drinkers have half the rate of a common liver cancer than the rest, and the more coffee they drank, the lower the risk.
The general NS position on coffee/caffeine: ‘Despite their ubiquity, the long-term effects of coffee, tea and caffeine remain uncertain’, and that’s about as clean a bill of health as we’re ever likely to get.