Coffee addicts (Millennium trilogy)

Here's a paragraph which I filched from the New York Times book review about the Millennium trilogy:

But these transparently “activist” moments are forgivable, as is the pathological coffee drinking, a tic that recurs so relentlessly that I don’t think Larsson realized it was a tic. A thought on this subject: Many of the Larsson faithful subscribe to a belief that the author’s premature death was not of natural causes. He had been threatened in real life by skinheads and neo-Nazis; ergo, the theories go, he was made dead by the very sorts of heavies who crop up in his novels. But such talk has been emphatically dismissed by Larsson’s intimates. So let me advance my own theory: Coffee killed him. If we accept that Blom­k­vist is, in many respects, a romanticized version of Larsson, and that Blomkvist’s habits reflected the author’s own, Larsson overcaffeinated himself to death. Of course, the cigarettes and junk food to which both men are/were partial couldn’t have helped, either.

Not being a coffee drinker myself, I tend to ignore people's coffee consumption in the same way that I tend to ignore the amount they smoke. I point out that "The time traveler's wife" also has coffee addicts and I lazily assumed that this was an American habit (not that the Millennium trilogy is American). I have often wondered why in the film "You've got mail", Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan frequently drink tea (a British habit) but not coffee.