Coffee has taken a number of rides on what might be called the research roller coaster. While I can’t say if this last one was particularly exhilarating, it should have been pleasant, and it was certainly long.

That’s because the carnies responsible strung together 218 old rides to create the new one, and those old rides had been combinations of even older ones. After crunching all the numbers that the ride required, the carnies-cum-researchers had more than eye strains and migraines: they had a clear, distinct, and positive pattern.

So clear, distinct, and positive that they wrote in a BMJ article that drinking coffee is “more likely to benefit health than harm [it].”

Yet before they ended the article, they stressed that more research needed to be done.

Can you believe that? After considering 218 studies that were actually comprised of multiple other studies — the results of which assessed how coffee consumption affected thousands upon thousands of people — researchers made a pleas for additional research.

Do researchers really need to be that cautious? Or do they simply see never-ending studies as a way to keep the research business booming?

Fortunately for the purposes of this column, those questions do not need to be answered, only asked. That’s because that rather noncommittal attitude expressed by the authors of the coffee research provides the perfect contrast to what comes next.

On the same page in the same February 2018 issue of a Tufts University Health & Nutrition Newsletter that contained the aforementioned coffee info appeared an article summarizing research recently published where type 2 diabetics stopped taking their meds and started losing weight. Guess how the editors chose to titled that one?

“Weight-Loss Reverses Diabetes.”

That’s right, in this seemingly ultraconservative world of health-and-fitness research where the word “may” seems to preface every single action verb written, this title leaves that word out — as well as any doubt about what happens when type 2 diabetics lose weight.

The study found that after one year of replacing their prescribed meds with an ambitious dose of dieting and exercising, nearly half of the subjects improved their glucose levels enough so that their doctors ceased all prescribed medication. In other words, they were cured of a disease that up until fairly recently was seen to be only controllable, not curable.

All the formerly afflicted had to do to be cured was keep off the excessive weight.

And the weight the subjects took off was certainly excessive. The average Body Mass Index of the 300 subjects used in this study (half of whom continued on their meds and didn’t diet or exercise) was 35 in a grading scheme where any score of 30 or higher indicates obesity.

Obviously, this is important news in the medical community, but is it really important for you? That answer is an obvious “yes” too — even if you do not possess a single precursor of type 2 diabetes.

That’s because there is something out there that could be just as debilitating to you in the long term. But it isn’t a medical disease. It’s a sort of perception sickness, a malady of the mind.

It occurs when you underestimate the degree to which your daily doings affect your health and fitness. But these daily doings often accrue and determine if you will be healthy or not years down the line.

For instance, a study published last year in the journal Neurology tied eating slightly more than a single serving of the leafy greens that constitute a salad a day to retaining your memory as you age. Specifically, when test results of a group of older subjects who averaged 1.3 servings of greens a day were compared over a five-year period to the results of older subjects who ate virtually no greens ever, the greens eaters displayed only half the mental decline.

But there’s ample evidence that your daily doings also affect how you feel the next day. And think, too.

A questionnaire constructed by professors Meredith E. Coles and Jacob A. Nota from the State University of New York at Binghamton created to gain insight on what leads to repetitive negative thoughts found a link between those and a lack of sufficient, restorative sleep.

Their work, published this year in the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, found that those who reported frequent sleep disturbances and insufficient sleep also found it more difficult to stop focusing on negative thoughts when they were exposed to them.

I hope my seemingly random selection of these two studies hammers home the important point that virtually everything you do tends to either help or hurt your overall health.

What better way to end than by recalling what Aristotle once said: “Excellence is not a singular act but a habit. You are what you repeatedly do.”

So repeatedly do healthy things and reap the benefits.