Does Coffee Cause Cancer?

August 7, 2023
“Numbers don’t lie, but they can be misleading,” according to cardiologist Labos’s meandering debut. Relating fictional conversations between a doctor and various interlocutors he meets while on a business trip, Labos busts such myths as “red wine is good for your heart” and “caffeine can trigger heart attacks” and explains how readers can spot misleading or overhyped food and medical research. The author pushes back against the belief that “vitamin C fights the common cold” by noting that one of the only studies supporting the claim found vitamin C’s efficacy limited to marathon runners, skiers, and Canadian soldiers. According to Labos, this dubious result shows how scientists can inadvertently manufacture positive findings by chopping up data in ways that concentrate among arbitrarily chosen subsets of participants the inevitable false positives that accompany any study. Corporate interests, Labos argues, also influence which scientific results are published; for example, the myth that “breakfast’s the most important meal of the day” originated in a magazine owned by cereal magnate John Harvey Kellogg. Unfortunately, the book’s narrative format can make it hard to follow Labos’s arguments (an interruptive barista leads the narrator on disruptive tangents while they discuss whether coffee causes cancer), and the surfeit of extraneous detail further distracts (“A flight attendant admonished me for not buckling my seat belt”). This struggles to stay on task.