Posts Tagged ‘Caffeine’

Posted on April 3, 2008 - by deCadmus

Coffee & Health: More Benefits, Still

Daily Coffee May Protect the Brain. New research suggests coffee may cut the risk of dementia by blocking the damage cholesterol can inflict on the body. Coffee had already been linked to a lower risk of Alzheimer’s Disease, and –according to the BBC– a study by a US team for the Journal of Neuroinflammation may explain why.

“Caffeine appears to block several of the disruptive effects of cholesterol that make the blood-brain barrier leaky,” said Dr Jonathan Geiger, who led the study.

“High levels of cholesterol are a risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease, perhaps by compromising the protective nature of the blood brain barrier.

“Caffeine is a safe and readily available drug and its ability to stabilise the blood brain barrier means it could have an important part to play in therapies against neurological disorders.”

And while we’re at it:

• Caffeine may help protect memory in women
• Coffee is tied to a lower risk of Parkinson’s
• Coffee is linked to a lower risk of Diabetes
• Coffee drinking is related to a lower risk of Liver Cancer.

Drink up!

Posted on August 29, 2007 - by deCadmus

Where Are the Great Good Places?

In a coffee shop, and with her infant daughter snoozing at her elbow, a single mom — recently divorced, and struggling to make ends meet — writes a story about a boy wizard and an enchanted school. She writes in a coffee shop not for inspiration, but because she doesn’t have money enough to heat her apartment. Her story, of course, the book Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone; the single mom, JK Rowling. I’m given to understand both mom and daughter are doing rather well, these days.

Rowling wasn’t the first author to take to the local coffee house — whether for warmth, or inspiration. Voltaire was an early coffee house patron, and he’s said to have tossed back between 50 and 72 cups a day (straying closer than most of us would dare to a lethal dose of caffeine) while writing works such as his fittingly frenzied Candide and Merope and his scathing Letters on the English.

It was a coffee house called Tillyard’s that was the unofficial home of The Royal Society — a clubby bunch who lunched and drank coffee and argued about alchemy — and ultimately published the collected works of their chair, one Isaac Newton. And in Austria you may be hard-pressed to find a coffee house that *doesn’t* boast of an author, poet or playwright who sat at that very table.

Given what passes for coffee house culture today, however, it’s remarkable that Rowling was able to pen a paragraph or two, much less a book empire. For all the lofty talk of the Third Place your chances of finding a Great, Good Place to write the Great American Novel are anything *but* great.¹

John Scalzi skewered most any remaining romantic notions of coffee house writing in his 250-page epic snark — and one of my favorite reads of the year — You’re Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop. And a clip from an episode of Family Guy making the rounds on YouTube doesn’t offer much hope, either. Still, you can’t keep folks from trying…

Of the countless coffee shops I’ve visited, I could probably count those that offered a viable third place on one hand. Which is a shame… and probably a factor of economics. Hard chairs, small tables and surfaces that echo (echo, echo…) tend to get customers in and out the door quickly. So maybe I’m not going to write my novel in a coffee shop. I can deal with that. But shouldn’t I be able to have a conversation?

What’s coffee house culture like in your corner of the world? Got a Great Good Place to share?

---

Notes and Links

1. Yeah, I know… the article talks about coffee shops in Scotland, and I reference the Great American Novel. I’m a fan of cognitive dissonance. ↩

---

Posted on August 22, 2007 - by deCadmus

Roasted ’til the Bitter End

Science Daily reports that chemists have identified those chemical compounds largely responsible for coffee’s bitterness. More, their findings suggest that most of the bitterness is introduced during coffee roasting.

“Everybody thinks that caffeine is the main bitter compound in coffee, but that’s definitely not the case,” says study leader Thomas Hofmann, Ph.D., a professor of food chemistry and molecular sensory science at the Technical University of Munich in Germany. Only 15 percent of java’s perceived bitterness is due to caffeine, he estimates, noting that caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee both have similar bitterness qualities.

“Roasting is the key factor driving bitter taste in coffee beans. So the stronger you roast the coffee, the more harsh it tends to get…”

This isn’t news to anyone who’s roasted coffee that they know to be exceptional, and ended up with something that could grow hair on a wildebeest’s chest. (And yes, that includes me. Er… as the roaster, not the wildebeest.)

The bit that leaves me scratching my head, however, is this:

“We’ve known for some time that the chlorogenic acid lactones are present in coffee, but their role as a source of bitterness was not known until now,” Hofmann says.

I have a number of books on coffee — books that have been popular references for years — that, I believe, speak at some length to the links between chlorogenic acids and bitterness. Maybe I’m missing something here. Or maybe there’s more to come still from the research.

Posted on August 15, 2007 - by deCadmus

Natural Decaf (Really!) — One Step Closer to Market

Coffee researchers in Ethiopia have started planting seedlings of a naturally low-in-caffeine coffee varietal that was found growing in the wild three years ago. Apparently the dust-up that followed that discovery — a pissing match between the Brazilian coffee researcher who “found” the plants and the government of Ethiopia which claimed the plants were taken without permission — has been settled.

“Coffee research centres are in the process of planting seedlings of natural coffee with low caffeine varieties, to enable Ethiopia to supply the world market within the shortest possible time,” said Abera Deressa, State Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development.

Don’t step out line for the processed stuff just yet, decaf fans. It’ll still be four years before this planting is mature enough to offer any potential for commercial sale… and even then, there’s still the matter of whether it will taste good.

Speaking of which, Agriculture Minister Deressa further used the occasion to urge researchers to develop coffees with higher yields:

“Although Ethiopia is home to arabica coffee with high generic diversity, the national average yield has not exceeded five to six quintals per hectare, which is lower than in other coffee producing countries,” he said.

Crap…

Um… Minister? Dude? We’ve been there. Done that. Planting varietals that boost coffee yields has always proved a disaster. Every. Single. Time.

Plant your fancy decaf coffee. We’re totally cool with that. Hey, it might even sell! But leave the heirloom varietals alone, okay? The world wants quality coffee and Ethiopia knows how to deliver.

Don’t mess with it.

Posted on August 7, 2007 - by deCadmus

For the Price of a Cup of Coffee

It’s the kind of thing you can almost set your watch by. No, not Old Faithful… but the slow-news-day, non-story that laments how much we’re spending on our (thrice) daily fix of caffeine, courtesy the corner coffee shop. This time out its ABC’s Chicago affiliate taking a whack with Coffee Crazed, a hard-hitting piece that dares to uncover… how much we’re really spending for our caffeine addiction.

Elizabeth Grandberry works in the Loop and visits her Starbucks about five times a week, spending anywhere from $3 to $5 each time.

“It used to be unheard of to spend more than a dollar for coffee,” said Grandberry.

It used to be unheard of to spend more than a nickel for a candy bar (back in the days when we could eat them without guilt) or thirteen cents for a postage stamp. It was similarly unheard of to spend thirty-nine cents on a loaf of bread, or a buck a gallon for gas. Surely, ABC, you can do better than this? Don’t you have, like, a financial expert that could put this all in perspective? Oh, why yes. Yes, you do…

Financial experts say that money spent on multiple coffee runs could turn into a small investment.

“Say you’re spending $4 a day every workday, that’s $80 a month times 12 months a year. That’s almost $1,000 a year,” said Christine Benz, Morningstar.

Why… that’d buy a couple pair of shoes for well-heeled Chicagoans. Maybe three if they’re on sale!

Really, if we’re going to talk about the opportunity cost of our caffeine fix, why don’t we think big? What could you *really* get for your coffee dollar, if you knew how to spend it?

For the price of a cup of coffee, maybe you could discover how to live for 300 years. You could mitigate mercury pollution. Or even achieve enlightenment.

What silly, caffeinated, people we are.

P.S. For a more sobering view (i.e. one that asks questions that matter) see, What’s the Hidden Cost of a £2 Latte?

Posted on July 31, 2007 - by deCadmus

Coffee Notes from All Over

• Just the same, don’t forget the sunscreen. Researchers have found that caffeine boosts resistance against UV radiation, and skin cancers.
  

  The relationship between caffeine and cancer cells is under close scrutiny following evidence that it can increase a process called “apoptosis”, in which the body gets rid of damaged or even cancerous cells by killing them off.

  To really boost the cancer-resisting effect? Add exercise into the mix.

• Talk softly, and carry a hot cuppa joe. Psychologists at Yale altered people’s judgments of a stranger by handing them a cup of coffee:
  

  The study participants, college students, had no idea that their social instincts were being deliberately manipulated. On the way to the laboratory, they had bumped into a laboratory assistant, who was holding textbooks, a clipboard, papers and a cup of hot or iced coffee — and asked for a hand with the cup.

  That was all it took: The students who held a cup of iced coffee rated a hypothetical person they later read about as being much colder, less social and more selfish than did their fellow students, who had momentarily held a cup of hot java.

• Let the battle begin! The World Barista Championship is underway in Tokyo, Japan. Forty-nine countries are represented this year, each by its own national champion. And this round of the WBC introduces a tasty new twist — for the first time ever spectators are able to sample some of the barista’s work. (What a concept!)

  While you can’t taste from here, you can watch the entire event. It’s not real-time, but that’s just fine… I understand they’re all night-owls on the other side of the planet.

Posted on March 28, 2007 - by deCadmus

Coffee, Caffeine, Nutrition and Health, Redux

A couple years ago I’d had it up to here with the constant stream of pseudo-scientific disinformation coming out of the camp of one or another self-proclaimed “nutritionist” who had clearly made it a cause célèbre to give coffee a bad rap. And so I researched and wrote a fairly exhaustive (hey, it exhausted *me* at the time) article — The Facts: Coffee, Caffeine, Nutrition and Health.

Two years on (more…)

Posted on May 20, 2005 - by deCadmus

The Facts: Coffee, Caffeine, Nutrition and Health

Even before its introduction to the West (and its subsequent baptism by then-pontiff Pope Clement VIII) coffee has been the subject of every kind of vitriol and indignity on grounds religious, social, political and medical. It’s unfair, really… but to be expected; coffee has proved time and again to be an effective, if unlikely and altogether unwitting agent of change.

Still today there remain those with an axe to grind with coffee — more frequently with its chief agent provocateur, caffeine — and who take no small delight in sewing seeds of fear, uncertainty and doubt where the health aspects of coffee are concerned. These reports typically offer no sources at all, or perhaps small-scale studies that have been dated for 40 years.

Let’s see if we can’t shed some light on the subject… using multiple, credible and authoritative sources, and send coffee’s naysayers scuttling back under their rocks.
(more…)