Breathtaking news for all you caffeine addicts out there — not only does coffee taste good and wake you up, it can prevent gout. Plus, you smell like coffee and it make you bulletproof.*

Never mind the tachycardia and frequent (sometimes alarmingly frequent) trips to use the gents, coffee is where it’s at.

According to a study of 45,000 men, if you drink four to six cups of coffee a day, then you cut your chances of developing gout (the most common kind of arthritis) in half!

Uh, But Watch for Caffeine Intoxication

However, if you have more than three or four cups of coffee, you may over-stimulate your central nervous system. I know, that sounds cool, but it can be bad. How bad? Well, symptoms include:

• restlessness
• nervousness
• excitement
• insomnia
• flushing of the face
• increased urination & gastrointestinal disturbance (count on these, and they won’t be pleasant)
• muscle twitching
• a rambling flow of thought and speech (granted, for some of us it’s hard to tell)
• irritability (ditto)
• irregular or rapid heart beat, and,
• psychomotor agitation.

What, pray tell, is psychomotor agitation? Well, essentially this will make you look like you have obsessive compulsive disorder, unless it just causes a terminal case of the Jiminy Leg. (Or arm, or hand, or feet, or teeth — wait, am I rambling, really, I didn’t think I was rambling, but then you said I was rambling and wait a minute, where did my coffee go, is that rambling coffee….)

*The Small Print: drinking excessive amounts of coffee does not make you bulletproof. (Though you may feel you’re fast enough to dodge them.)

You can find the New Scientist story about it all here. Photo by Snuggle Up & Read. The whole set of Talkin Timmy’s lids is here.

For similar reasons, Alltop drinks herbal tea laced with cocaine. Originally published in May 2007, when I thought gout was funny.