Thinking about the new Trump administration in 2024, Republicans transforming into the 1990s Democratic party - except they haven't banned nuclear power again yet - was not on anyone's Cultural Bingo card.(1)
Yet here we have it. Kooky anti-science progressives, who were still promoting Measles Parties in Whole Foods and supplement stores in 2020, before the COVID-19 pandemic, suddenly claim they love science.(2) The same epidemiology that left-wing people trotted out to claim the modern world was killing us - red meat causes cancer, vegetable oil prevents heart disease - is now being name-dropped by the right-wing to claim red meat prevents cancer and vegetable oil causes heart disease. And many of the same people casually flipped to promoting the opposite of what they believed 10 years ago.
If your neck hurts watching these political gymnastics there is good news; a recent paper gave the French something to cheer about, and Americans also. Coffee is a miracle product!(3)
In a recent paper, the raw numbers using the Nurses’ Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-up Study found that coffee drinkers had 57% fewer dementia diagnoses per 100,000 person-years while the reduced risk over decades for heavy coffee drinkers was 18%.
This is a big slap in the face to old epidemiological claims, like from Center for Science in the Public Interest claiming coffee caused breast cancer. Along with artificial sweeteners. And that low-fat diets reduced obesity. And that food coloring caused birth defects.(4)
Activists in France's International Agency for Research on Cancer were about to increase the hazard classification when they were exposed by us for manipulating inclusion of papers to insure everything causes cancer and did a sudden pivot to be able to show they reduced the hazard belief about one thing and were science-y after all.
Yes, it is observational, and therefore only EXPLORATORY and not science, but that tea and decaffeinated coffee did not help is some indication the signal is real.
Like with their war on vaccines and agriculture beginning in the 1990s, we can expect the English to be out in front denying this new work.(5)
Not much has changed since 1674.
But if you dislike coffee and still want a protective effect, epidemiology has other ways to prevent everything: get a dog.
NOTES:
(1) In early 2017, President-elect Trump met with Robert Kennedy, Jr. and Science Left Behind co-author Dr. Alex Berezow and I were asked by the Wall Street Journal to write a piece about vaccines. We did, and the Trump transition team stated he had met with Kennedy but there was no plan for a vaccine commission or his involvement in their work.
That was impressive. Trump, a former Democrat, probably did believe vaccines cause autism, just like Obama suggested when he ran for president, but he changed his mind. In 2025, there was no changing, however.
(2) Except they always said that, and still don't. Regular old liberals, and there are fewer and fewer of those, as we can see by representation in Congress, have come back to the science side, and seem to be relieved they can claim Democrats are the Party of Science just a few years after they tried to ban GMOs and did block all nuclear energy.(1) The others, the Vani Hari and Dr. Oz types who sell alternatives to science, have gone from Obama simps to MAGA Trumpers because one of their prophets, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, former Natural Resources Defense Council lawyer and Friend of Obama, switched parties.
When Vani Hari, the self-proclaimed "Food Babe", first began claiming microwave ovens cause cancer while the organic wine she sells is not a carcinogen, I was dismissed by her and other progressive science deniers as a right-wing shill for Big Chemical. Now I am a left-wing shill for Big Chemical. I haven't changed. Her financial plan did, though.
(3) Sure, it is still epidemiology, and therefore just correlation and stuffed with words like "suggests" and "linked to" but the entire state of California turned over all of its science and health policy to a French group of epidemiologists and seem to love having Proposition 65 'cancer warning' labels on 80,000 harmless products. The Governor is campaigning for President so if he wins, he can do to science for the whole country what his party did to California.
It might work. Republicans and Democrats are Democrats are both always seeking new ways to race to the bottom of science literacy.
(4) Like all activist groups, they are a legal sue-and-settle outfit, not a science one, and their founder Michael Jacobson, Ph.D., was so culturally corrosive (his mentor was Ralph Nader, after all) that he suggested Dr. Elizabeth Whelan, founder of the American Council on Science and Health and chief debunker of his hysteria, might have been sleeping with Drs. Norm Borlaug and Fred Stare and that is why they sided with her over scaremongering.
(5) Satire is funny because it has hints of truth:
... the Excessive use of that Newfangled, Abominable, Heathenish Liquor called COFFEE, which Riffling Nature of her Choicest Treasures, and Drying up the Radical Moisture, has so Eunucht our Husbands that they are become as unfruitful as those Desarts whence that unhappy Berry is said to be brought.
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