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There has been a lot of publicity lately that one or two cups of coffee a day is good for you. But evidence is emerging to cast doubt on that recommendation. So is coffee a health benefit or a health risk?

It's fairly well established now that a small amount of caffeine every day improves asthma and helps dissolve gallstones. It can also reduce the risk of Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's and some types of cancer. However, it's important to keep the amount small - because in high doses, coffee becomes dangerous for pregnant women and people with high blood pressure or heart trouble.

And that's where the problem lies, because translating that small amount into a recommended number of cups is difficult, if not impossible.

The reason is that the amount of caffeine in one cup of coffee is unpredictable. VERY unpredictable - it can be anything from 25mg to 200mg. In other words, some cups of coffee have NINE TIMES more caffeine than others!

What that means is that someone drinking two cups of coffee from one cafe may be consuming only 50mg of caffeine a day, whereas someone drinking the same number of cups from another shop may be taking in 400mg.

400mg is the dose that stopped a man's heart last August, after he drank eight cans of Red Bull (luckily, he survived). Fortunately that's rare, but it is generally accepted that 400mg is the point at which coffee starts to cause negative effects in almost everyone people get edgy, over-anxious, and have trouble sleeping. Coffee addicts often see this "hyper" state as a good thing a "coffee buzz". But in fact, it's what's called negative reinforcement. Without coffee, the heavy coffee drinker feels drab or tired, and may get a headache. Another cup of java just gets rid of those withdrawal symptoms, but in comparison it feels like a high.

It becomes a vicious circle too much coffee affects your sleep patterns, so you're tired, so you need more coffee to stay focused, so your sleep gets even worse. And if you've been keeping up with the news, you'll know there's a lot of evidence that cutting short on sleep means cutting short your life span! So if coffee is affecting your sleep, its negative effect is far outweighing its positive benefits, and you need to cut it down or cut it out.

It's not just coffee late in the day that affects your sleep, either. Studies have shown that people who drink coffee have about half the melatonin levels in their bodies as people who don't (melatonin is the brain chemical that sends us to sleep).

The bottom line is that if you are a coffee drinker and you're having trouble sleeping, you should try giving it up for a week or so, and see if your sleep improves. If it does, then you were overdosing: if you do go back to coffee drinking, reduce your intake. Be warned stop drinking coffee and you will almost certainly get some severe headaches, which will last for a day or two. If you actually get the shakes (which some do), then take that as a sign you definitely need to cut down!

Coffee is like most other foods fine in moderation, not so good if taken to excess. Unfortunately, until we can find some way of standardizing its caffeine content (which I hope they never will, because it will probably standardize and destroy its taste!), it's difficult for the average joe to work out what moderation is.

Learn more about this author, Marisa Wright.
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