Children's poor grades have something to do with coffee?

Now we all know coffee is a good thing, but people used to think differently. Let's look back at centuries of endless debate over coffee.

16th century: Coffee can make people excited. Legend has it that a shepherd named Kaldi in Ethiopia discovered that his sheep would suddenly get excited after eating a kind of oily green leaves and red berries. He personally experimented with the plant, which we know today as coffee.

17th century: Coffee can cure alcoholism. Especially in England, where alcoholism is rife, it is seen as a cure for alcoholism. A 1652 article claimed that coffee could aid digestion, relieve and cure gout and scurvy, relieve coughs, headaches and stomachaches, and even prevent miscarriages.

18th century: Coffee makes people work long hours. In London in 1730 tea replaced coffee as the daily drink. The American colonists had a preference for tea until the Boston Tea Party of 1773 characterized it as an "unpatriotic act." But since the tea incident, coffee shops have grown in number. The apparent pick-me-up effect led to the belief that drinking coffee would keep colonists working longer.

1927: Coffee is the cause of poor grades among children. In 1927, a scientific journal published a survey involving 80,000 elementary and middle school students. The researchers were "shocked" to announce that children who drank more than one cup of coffee a day performed poorly academically.

(Excerpt from Hu Yiren, author of The Paper)