Nehaveigur

Swedes drink a lot of coffee, and at all times of the day. One of the few fragments of Swedish I remember from my time there is ingår påtår?, which means, are refills included? It’s important to know if the café you’re considering is going to give you free coffee top-ups.

In the 1700s, coffee was relatively new to Europe and it was commonly believed that it was a danger to public health. The king of Sweden went as far a banning coffee drinking and to prove his point, he selected a criminal who had been condemned to death, commuted his sentence to life imprisonment and forced him to drink several pots of coffee each day.

The experiment backfired. The coffee drinking criminal kept on living long after the king himself had died. The exact age at which the convict died is unknown because the two physicians who had been assigned to monitor this study also passed away before him.

Back then, it wasn’t only the Swedes who were worried about coffee. Growing up in Austria in the 1990s, I was taught an old song about the dangers of coffee:

K-a-f-f-e-e,
trink nicht so viel Kaffee!
Nicht für Kinder ist der Türkentrank,
schwächt die Nerven, macht dich blass und krank.
Sei doch kein Muselmann,der ihn nicht lassen kann!

In English:

C-o-f-f-e-e,
Don't drink so much coffee!
The Turkish drink is not for children,
weakens the nerves, makes you pale and sick.
Don't be a Musulman who cannot leave it!

The first known print of this coffee- and Islamophobic little song is from 1846 and it’s inspired by the origin of coffee in the orient and the historic conflict between Central Europe and the Ottoman empire.

Today we know that for most people, coffee does not cause any problems. On the contrary, there is good epidemiological evidence that drinking coffee is associated with lower mortality. This association holds even when taking into account the possibility that some people may stop drinking coffee when they don’t feel well, making it more likely that we’re looking at causation rather than just association.