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Truth Seekers: Where Data Meets Reality
Tired of sensational headlines and conflicting health advice? Join Alex Barrett and Bill Morrison as they cut through the noise to uncover what scientific research actually says about the claims flooding your social media feed.
Each week, Alex and Bill tackle a different health, nutrition, or wellness claim that everyone's talking about. From "blue light ruins your sleep" to "seed oils are toxic," they dig into the actual studies, examine the methodologies, and translate the data into plain English.
No agenda. No sponsors to please. No credentials to fake. Just two people committed to finding out what's really true by going straight to the source—the research itself.
Perfect for anyone who's skeptical of influencer health advice but doesn't have time to read every scientific study themselves. New episodes drop regularly, delivering clarity in a world full of clickbait.
Question everything. Verify with data. Find the truth.
Disclaimer: Truth Seekers provides educational content based on published research. Nothing in this podcast should be considered medical, financial, or professional advice. Always consult qualified professionals for decisions affecting your health and wellbeing.
Now I'll rewrite the script with all the human conversation elements:
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**Morning Coffee Saves Your Heart (But Only If You Drink It At The Right Time)**
Alex: Right, so apparently I've been doing coffee wrong my entire life.
Bill: Okay, what did you see?
Alex: Morning coffee reduces cardiovascular death by 31%. Afternoon coffee does nothing. It's absolutely everywhere.
Bill: The European Society of Cardiology study.
Alex: Yes, and I'm genuinely confused because—hang on, wasn't there just a study saying high caffeine is *bad* for your heart?
Bill: There was! August 2024, American College of—
Alex: That's the one.
Bill: —Cardiology, yeah. Said chronic high caffeine consumption heightens cardiovascular risk. Now January 2025, same general topic, completely opposite advice.
Alex: And millions of people drink coffee every single day. This isn't some obscure supplement.
Bill: Right.
Alex: This is "should I have my second cup at noon or not?" That's why I actually care about this one.
Bill: So let's look at what the study actually found. Because I think the headline and the research are telling two very different stories.
Alex: Please tell me they didn't just make this up.
Bill: No, no. This is a large observational study—over 40,000 adults followed for nearly 10 years. They divided people into three groups: morning coffee drinkers, all-day coffee drinkers, and non-drinkers.
Alex: Okay.
Bill: Morning drinkers had a hazard ratio of 0.69 compared to non-drinkers. That's a 31% reduction in cardiovascular mortality.
Alex: Right, that's the headline number.
Bill: All-day drinkers, though? No significant reduction. The confidence interval crossed 1.0, meaning statistically they couldn't say all-day coffee drinkers were any different from non-drinkers.
Alex: So morning coffee good, all-day coffee bad, timing matters. Except I'm guessing there's a rather large problem with that interpretation.
Bill: The biggest problem in observational research.
Alex: Confounding.
Bill: Massive confounding. So—who drinks coffee all day long? Not just morning, but afternoon and evening too?
Alex: People who are knackered? People who work irregular hours?
Bill: Exactly. Shift workers. People with sleep disorders who need caffeine to stay awake. Highly stressed individuals. The study even acknowledges this—they say right in the paper, "Many all-day drinkers suffer from sleep disturbances."
Alex: Hang on.
Bill: Yeah.
Alex: So they're saying all-day drinkers have worse health outcomes, but they're *also* noting that all-day drinkers already have sleep disturbances. That's not a finding about coffee—that's evidence they're a less healthy group to begin with.
Bill: That's exactly the problem. Shift workers have independently elevated cardiovascular risk—20 to 40% higher in some studies—completely separate from coffee.
Alex: Wait, didn't we talk about this before? The shift worker thing?
Bill: Mmm, yeah, I think so.
Alex: The fasting study, wasn't it? Where shift workers looked like they were doing time-restricted eating, but actually they were just...
Bill: Oh, right! The fruit flies episode. Yeah, same problem—people whose work schedules force them into a pattern that looks like a choice but isn't.
Alex: That's it. So here it's the same thing—shift workers drink coffee all day because their schedules are chaos, and then we're surprised they have worse health outcomes.
Bill: And you can't conclude the coffee timing caused it.
Alex: Okay, but—and I'm genuinely asking this, not trying to be difficult—
Bill: Go ahead.
Alex: Even with the confounding, doesn't a 31% reduction still suggest *something* is going on? Like, even if we can't prove causation, isn't that big enough to at least say, "Huh, maybe there's something here"?
Bill: Well, yes and no.
Alex: That's not an answer.
Bill: Okay, let me think about this. The 31% is relative risk, right? In absolute terms, cardiovascular mortality among non-drinkers in this study was about 3%. Among morning coffee drinkers, about 2.1%. So we're talking about a 1 percentage point difference in absolute risk.
Alex: Still, that's not nothing.
Bill: It's not nothing if it's real. But here's the thing—morning coffee drinkers aren't just different because of when they drink coffee. They're morning people, chronotype-wise. They have regular sleep schedules. They probably have more structured routines, more stable jobs. When I was doing A/B testing at the tech company, if I saw a 31% difference but the groups were fundamentally different before the intervention, I'd throw out the whole test.
Alex: Right, but this isn't an A/B test. We don't get to randomize people's lives.
Bill: Exactly. That's why observational data is tricky. The 31% might be entirely explained by the fact that morning people have better health outcomes just from circadian alignment. The coffee might be doing absolutely nothing.
Alex: Okay. Yeah, I see that.
Bill: Does that make sense?
Alex: It does. I think I was latching onto the number because it's so specific, but you're right—if the groups are already different, the number doesn't actually tell us what we think it tells us.
Bill: And to their credit, the lead researcher, Dr. Lu Qi from Tulane, explicitly said—let me get this right—"This study doesn't tell us why drinking coffee in the morning reduces the risk of death from cardiovascular disease."
Alex: Wait, they said that? The researchers themselves admitted they don't know why?
Bill: Yep. He offered a hypothesis about afternoon coffee disrupting circadian rhythms and melatonin, but he was clear that's speculation, not what the data proved.
Alex: That's... actually quite good. Intellectually honest.
Bill: The press release, though—
Alex: Oh, I bet the press release wasn't quite as cautious.
Bill: European Society of Cardiology led with "Morning coffee may protect the heart better than all-day coffee drinking." The word "protect" implies causation.
Alex: And suddenly everyone thinks they need to change when they drink their coffee.
Bill: Right. So, who are these morning coffee drinkers? We've talked about shift workers, but let's flip it. What kind of person drinks coffee only in the morning and then stops?
Alex: Someone who's worried about sleep?
Bill: Maybe. Someone with a regular 9-to-5 job. Someone who's read that you shouldn't have caffeine after 2 PM.
Alex: Health-conscious people.
Bill: Possibly. People whose lives are structured enough that they can have a routine.
Alex: So morning people, who we know from other research tend to have better health outcomes just from circadian alignment, also prefer morning coffee. And now we're supposed to believe the coffee is what's protecting them?
Bill: That's the question the study can't answer.
Alex: What did they adjust for? They must have adjusted for some of this.
Bill: They adjusted for sleep hours, income, diet quality, smoking, exercise.
Alex: Okay, so—
Bill: But they didn't adjust for work schedule type. Whether someone's a shift worker. They didn't measure diagnosed sleep disorders separately. They didn't account for stress levels or chronotype preference.
Alex: And those are exactly the things that would explain why morning-only drinkers and all-day drinkers are different.
Bill: Those are the unmeasured confounders. We call this selection bias—people self-select into groups based on characteristics that also affect the outcome.
Alex: Hang on, I want to go back to something. That August study you mentioned—the one that said caffeine is risky. How does that actually fit in with this?
Bill: Different thing entirely. That was a small study—wait, let me remember the number—92 healthy young adults.
Alex: Okay.
Bill: They were measuring acute physiological responses. High caffeine intake elevated blood pressure, affected heart rate recovery after exercise.
Alex: So short-term effects in a lab setting.
Bill: Right. This new study is looking at long-term mortality outcomes in tens of thousands of people over a decade. They're measuring completely different things. You can have both be true—caffeine temporarily raises blood pressure, but people who drink coffee in the morning happen to live longer for reasons unrelated to the coffee.
Alex: That's the frustrating bit, though, isn't it? When I was covering health stories, everyone wanted a simple answer—"Is coffee good or bad?"—and the actual science is always "Well, it depends on what you're measuring, who you're studying, and what else is going on in their lives."
Bill: And observational studies like this one can't separate those things. You'd need a randomized controlled trial where you assign people to drink coffee at different times for years and see what happens.
Alex: Has anyone done that?
Bill: No.
Alex: Why not?
Bill: Because it would be incredibly expensive and difficult to maintain for a decade. How do you get people to stick to a coffee schedule for ten years?
Alex: Right, okay. So we're stuck with observational data.
Bill: Which is useful for generating hypotheses, but not for proving that changing your coffee timing will improve your health.
Alex: Here's what I'm actually wondering, though—if evening coffee genuinely disrupts sleep for some people, and poor sleep increases cardiovascular risk, couldn't there still be some validity to avoiding evening coffee?
Bill: Oh, absolutely. That part is well-established—caffeine late in the day can suppress melatonin and disrupt sleep in caffeine-sensitive people. If you're someone who finds evening coffee keeps you awake, you probably shouldn't drink it.
Alex: But that's different from saying "morning coffee protects your heart better."
Bill: Completely different. One is "avoid evening coffee if it disrupts your sleep, because sleep is important." The other is "drinking coffee in the morning is protective compared to not drinking coffee." The study doesn't prove the second claim.
Alex: And the media coverage made it sound like the second claim.
Bill: This is where the gap happens. Researchers find an association, acknowledge they don't know why, suggest a plausible mechanism. Media translates that to "morning coffee protects your heart," and suddenly people think they should change their habits.
Alex: When really, the advice should be much simpler.
Bill: Right.
Alex: If coffee affects your sleep, don't drink it before bed. But your chronotype, your work schedule, your sleep quality overall—those probably matter way more than when you drink your coffee.
Bill: That's what the evidence actually supports. The American Heart Association recommends up to 400 milligrams of caffeine daily—about four cups—but they don't have timing-based recommendations because the evidence doesn't support it.
Alex: So what should people actually do with this information?
Bill: If you're a morning person who drinks coffee in the morning and it works for you, great, keep doing that. If you drink coffee throughout the day and sleep fine, there's no evidence you need to change. If evening coffee keeps you awake, that's a sign to stop earlier—but that's about sleep, not some magical protective effect of morning coffee.
Alex: The real takeaway is that observational studies can show us patterns, but they can't tell us what to do differently unless we understand why the pattern exists.
Bill: And in this case, the pattern probably exists because morning coffee drinkers are fundamentally different people. More likely to have regular schedules, better sleep, different jobs. Not because the coffee timing itself is protective.
Alex: Which is actually more empowering in a way, isn't it? You don't need to stress about drinking your coffee at exactly the right time. Focus on sleep, manage stress, maintain a regular schedule if you can—those are the things that actually matter.
Bill: And if the headlines make you second-guess your afternoon coffee, remember to ask: Is this causation, or just correlation with a really obvious confounding variable?
Alex: Like "people who drink coffee all day often have disrupted sleep already."
Bill: Once you see it, you can't unsee it.
Alex: That's the goal, right? Give people the tools to spot these gaps themselves. Next time you see a headline about timing and health, ask who the people are in each group and whether they might be different for reasons beyond just timing.
Bill: Exactly.
Alex: Brilliant. Now I'm going to have my second coffee at noon without guilt.
Bill: As you should.