As a Chicago native, I’ll do more than give you an NCA resource. I’d like to point you to a couple of resources to address a much bigger crisis in medical journalism, both curiously coming from the UK:

• Neuroskeptic
• Bad Science

Say the words “adults and caffeine” and “journalism” in the same post, and our alarms go off in a major way — knowing what a scientifically ignorant, public confusion-mongering, and misinforming job that mainstream journalists perform on this topic on a weekly basis.

We sincerely hope you prove this stereotype wrong, because neither the medical research community nor the journalists covering them have any business beating the dead horse of coffee and caffeine consumption any further. After 1,000 years of human consumption, there’s nothing new left to be said about coffee. And after untold years of conflicting, weekly medical studies, enough is enough — it’s time to move on to more pressing, medically productive health concerns.

Whatever you do, please avoid these two major traps of medical/science journalism:

• The standard journalism template of “food contains a chemical, the chemical does x in a dish on a lab bench, therefore the food does x to people”
• data mist: or where someone gets one trivial bit of myopic research data lodged in their imagination and it suddenly explains the entirety of medicine

My name is Isabella and I am a student in the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

I am writing a feature on adults and caffeine, particularly coffee. I saw your National Coffee Association article on Vending Times and was hoping you could help me with data and statistics with a copy of the NCA’s 2008 Coffee Drinking Trends study.

If you have a copy of the report - or any information, data, etc. - I would be incredibly grateful!

Please feel free to contact me with any questions or comments you might have.

Thank you again,

Isabella