(TheAtlantic) - Coffee, tea, beer, and wine seem to make kidney stones less likely.

PROBLEM: Kidney stones cause the sort of pain that people rate as highly as childbirth. They also cost the U.S. about $2 billion per year, caring for them and in terms of the missed work they cause. Ounces of prevention being worth ounces of stone-free urine, what are the best things to drink to keep kidney stones from forming?

METHODOLOGY: Researchers led by Dr. Pietro Manuel Ferraro at Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Rome, Italy, and Dr. Gary Curhan at Harvard reviewed data from 194,095 patients who had never before had kidney stones, for an average of eight years. The subjects all reported what they drank (on an annual or biennial basis), and how many stones they got.