Hooray for Coffee!

How I love to start the day with a black, sweet, steaming cup of coffee!

When I was going through chemo, I imposed a fairly strict regime on myself: no alcohol, lots of fruit and veg...and no caffeine.  I still maintain that this totally unscientific approach helped me both physically (if nothing else it meant that I tended to drink more water which seems important when your body is being pumped full of chemicals) but it also gave me a sense of having something I could control at a time when otherwise I had no choice about what was being done to me.

But, the very first morning after my last chemo, I celebrated with a glorious mug of morning coffee.

I felt a little guilty as I slipped back into 'bad' habits but now some nice scientists in Sweden have come up with some wonderful results that mean I should actually be drinking more coffee - ideally two cups every day.  How great is that?  It seems that coffee might make Tamoxifen more effective and can reduce the recurrence of cancers by 50%.  Oh yes, you read that correctly - indulging that caffeine habit alongside your daily pill can actually reduce your chances of getting cancer again by half.

I'm always a bit cynical about these trials - sometimes it seems as if scientists can prove anything if they put their mind to it - but they aren't the first to identify coffee as cancer-fighting: an earlier test in the US linked coffee consumption to a reduction in the incidence of skin cancers.  That's good enough for me.

Time to put the kettle on and breathe in the glorious aroma of cancer-busting coffee.