What I was working as a media consultant a few years back, European coffee marketers-a jittery lot asked me to advise them on their image problems.

As we discussed their business, they shifted in their chairs, drummed their fingers scratched their heads. They were worried sick about a spike in media coverage of studies which asserted that too much caffeine causes health problem. Doctors had been warning that excessive coffee consumption could lead to cardiovascular difficulties.

When I proposed a counter- campaign to promote moderation, the Italian in the group jumped up and shouted: "Not in my market. We are a nation of coffee addicts and we like it that way". Amid nervous laughter everyone concurred and we adjourned early.

And so they all must be delighted at the June issue of Stroke, a journal of the American Heart Association, which has published a new study asserting that " high consumption of coffee and tea may reduce the risk of cerebral infarction(embolic strokes) among men."

The study, conducted in coffee-mad Finland, was managed by the Karolinska Institute of Stockhohn and the National Public Health Institute, Helsinki. Researchers recruited 29,133 Finnish men aged 50 to 69 in 1985 and followed them for several years. Those who consumed eight or more cups of coffee per day, the results indicated, had a 23 percent lower risk of cerebral infarction the most common kind of stroke. "Beneficial effects of consumption are biologically plausible because coffee and tea contain phenolic compounds with antioxidant properties that may prevent atherosclerosis." the study asserts.

Coffee has a long history of ups and downs. It has been credited with enabling awesome intellectual feats, bit it also has been blamed for anything from sparking riots to inspiring Satanic worship. Although the Turks get credit for creating the first coffee culture in the 1600s, the Grand Mufti of Constantinople banned it in the 16th century. Any coffee-drinker found guilty of a second offence was bound into a leather bag and dumped at sea.

But coffee made a comeback in Turkey and spread to Western Europe. By the mid 1600s, coffee houses were sprouting up in Paris and London. In England. the Coffee Club met in Westminster at the Truk's Head, where such leading lights as Andrew Marvell and Samuel Pepys talked with their peers about the latest philosophical and political concepts, like the ballot box. In America, the Boston Tea Party trans formed coffee into the national drink.

The most documented account of coffee addiction came from the pen of Honore de Balzac, who lovingly examined the beverage in his classic The pleasures and Pain of Coffee. He compared the effects of coffee to " sparks shooting all the a way up to the brain". Balzac died at 51, his stomach riddled with disease then attributed to his coffee addiction.

The new Finnish study notwith standing, how could you overcome your coffee addiction if you chose to? Some doctors will advise you to switch to tea or a few cups of hot water a day.

I tried to stop my five-a -day coffee habit recently and ended up with a range of dreary side effects- three weeks of jitters and a sluggish brain. Eventually, my natural stimulus system came back to life after years of suppression by caffeine, and I functioned just about normally again.

Like all addicts, though, I craved my demon and was gradually readdicted. Thus, I was as delighted as everyone else to learn from stroke that I could and perhaps should--be drinking even more coffee.

The coffee marketers must be celebrating-perhaps this time with Irish coffee.