It may be a tempting sky blue color, but could you ever imagine drinking, either straight up or on the rocks, a nice tall glass of windshield wiper fluid?

It seems like a foolish question to ask since windshield wiper fluid is at least 30 percent methanol, aka wood alcohol. That stuff’s poisonous and can cause permanent blindness or death if swallowed.

Yet because it was used in the making of just about all the illegal alcohol sold in America during Prohibition — the Mob Museum website estimates 98 percent of the booze seized by the Feds contained it — thousands upon thousands of Americans willingly consumed wood alcohol over that 13-year period. And thousands upon thousands — journalist Edward Samuel Behr estimates 10,000 — died from wood alcohol poisoning before Prohibition was repealed.

So what about the remaining 2 percent of the confiscated booze?

It wasn’t brewed in America but smuggled into America, much of it by one single sea captain who brought in legitimate Irish and Canadian whisky, rye, and wine. The sea captain saw himself as an “honest lawbreaker,” as Rebecca Schlam Lutto writes in a 1983 New York Times article, so he sold the stuff uncut, meaning there was no chance of going blind or dying if you drank his stuff.

That sea captain’s name has yet to be revealed, and you’ll know the reason why if you remember the intro to last week’s article on creatine. Or if you just look back at today’s title.

For William Frederick “Bill” McCoy’s decision to sell his bootlegged booze unadulterated is just another reason why we call genuine and authentic things the real McCoy. And when it comes to things to do to help your health, drinking coffee is exactly that.

Past studies have found an association between the daily and moderate consumption of coffee and a lower risk of Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease, type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, chronic kidney disease, liver disease, liver cancer, gallstones, and kidney stones, as well as improved mood and a lower risk of depression.

Additional research led by Stephen Safe, PhD, at Texas A&M University and published in the March 2026 issue of Nutrients provides insight into just why that all occurs.

The research focused on something that at first glance might strike you as the sequence of a European license plate, NR4A1. And while somewhere in the Old World it very well may be, in the laboratory it’s the name of a protein receptor in your body that fights oxidative damage and inflammatory stress.

Your production of NR4A1 decreases with age and that decrease affects aging and lifespan. Safe and colleagues discovered this while doing prior research using mice, research that also showed NR4A1 protected the animals from tissue damage and cell injury.

Equally important in that research was a related finding. That certain compounds bind to NR4A1 and make it function better.

That led Safe to next investigate whether the polyphenols found in coffee bind to NR4A1 and make it more effective.

So he recruited colleagues, purchased the same type of human cells used in cancer research, obtained coffee samples from A & M’s department of coffee research and education, and then experimented and experimented.

Polyphenols are natural compounds found in plant foods that your body uses to neutralize the free radicals that create inflammation and oxidative damage. The study concluded that the ones found in coffee, such as ferulic and caffeic acid, as well as two organic compounds, cafestrol and kahweol, do indeed bind to NR4A1, suggesting that that list of health benefits derived from coffee consumption is due “in part” as a result of these substances.

And if you need any more substance that coffee is indeed a real health McCoy, consider the study published in the July 2026 issue of the European Journal of Nutrition. It found that habitual coffee drinkers have a leaner body composition than those who don’t — as well as fewer circulating branch-chained amino acids in their blood.

The last finding is especially significant since high levels of circulating BCAAs have been determined to increase the odds of having obesity, type 2 diabetes, and heart disease.

Researchers at the University of Oulu in Finland came to these conclusions by analyzing health data collected on the more than 3,200 participants in a follow-up study of the Northern Finland Birth Cohort 1966. As part of the follow-up and the initial study, researchers calculated the participants’ body mass index, waist-to-hip ratio, and body fat percentage and questioned the participants about their coffee consumption.

From this, the researchers found that those who drank the highest amounts of coffee had less fat and more muscle compared to those who didn’t drink coffee at all. Moreover, a higher coffee intake in men was linked to higher amounts of testosterone and sex hormone-binding globulin, SHBG, which has been linked to a lower risk of insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, and prostate cancer.