Rhetoric

Probably one of the best college courses I ever had: the entire semester with Dr. Gary Pittinger was devoted to learning the dangers of logical fallacies. One of the more famous, of course, was post hoc, ergo propter hoc. It's a fallacy that's so tempting: noting correlation and drawing causation. But in life, because it is inherently way more complex than are usually willing to admit, determining causation is well nigh impossible. Why? Because of those wretched confounders; unaccounted for variables.

So, here I was, utterly convinced that the trick to solving the migraine problem was simply this: at mid February I cut the coffee consumption down to 1 mug in the morning. I have since then, occasionally (very occasionally) had a third cup sometime during the day, or a decaf at night. Today marks day 91 sans migraines, Deo gratias!

But this morning something hit me that had not even dawned on me before. It wasn't only the amount of coffee that changed. Also how we brewed it changed. We had one of those nice cuisinart devices that went off with your alarm, ground the beans, and then brewed the coffee by dripping. We've had it for years. In fact, every morning for years beyond memory, drip coffee is how the day had begun.

Son-in-law, Pr. Dean Herberts, introduced us to the simplicity of pour over last year, though, and we immediately noted how much more we liked the taste. Richer and yet, what? Less acidic? I'm not sure. Just better. So when we put away the pot that made the four cups we always drank first thing in the a.m., we opted to clean off our counter and just use our beloved pour over. And so we've done since Prelent started: just pour over coffee. AND, when I've had that splurge in the afternoon now and again, I've also ordered a pour over from Starbucks, and intentionally declined anything they had drip brewed.

So I've been wondering all day: is it cutting back the amount that stopped the migraines? Is it the brew method that stopped them? Is it both of those together? Is it both of those combined with a zero-carb life-style where I eat mostly straight meat, eggs, fish, high fat dairy? Too many confounders to know for sure yet, but I am planning on sticking with the pour over (which tastes better anyway, as I said) and we'll see what happens.