How can I not point out a study that says coffee is good for the liver. Read this in a New Scientist article on Liver troubles:
"Doctors have a saying that everything you enjoy is either illegal, immoral or bad for you, so it's nice to discover that coffee is good for you," says Arthur Klatsky, an epidemiologist at Kaiser Permanente in Oakland, California. His team has found that drinking four cups of coffee a day reduces the risk of non-alcoholic cirrhosis by 30 per cent and of alcoholic cirrhosis by 80 per cent.The research, published last year, is the latest in a string of studies showing coffee protects the liver. "I haven't the slightest idea what the mechanism is," says Klatsky. "We don't know for sure whether it's caffeine or something else."
Chris Day of Newcastle University in the UK thinks the effect could be due to the anti-inflammatory properties of theophylline, a breakdown product of caffeine. Most studies have failed to find any benefit from tea, which contains both theophylline and caffeine, but as Day laughingly points out, the studies were done in the US, "where tea is notoriously as weak as bathwater".