Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Coffee may not raise blood pressure: Study

Coffee may not raise blood pressure: StudyGood news for those who need a bit more coffee to get through their daily grind as the scientists have claimed that it may not increase your blood pressure. It's been suggested that coffee could cause high blood pressure, or hypertension, which has been linked to heart disease, strokes and shorter life expectancy.

But a new extensive study by a team from the Louisiana State University School of Public Health in New Orleans has now overturned this concern. It concluded that people who have several cups a day fare no worse than those who drink coffee less frequently.

For the study, the researchers pooled data from six old studies, covering 170,000 people, which asked participants how much coffee they drank each day and then followed them for up to 33 years.

According to their analysis, published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, about one in five developed high blood pressure with the chance of diagnosis no different for people who said they drank more than five cups of a coffee a day compared with those who drank very little. But a member of the research team, Liwei Chen, said the relationship between coffee-drinking and blood pressure is complicated by the possibility that it does not work the same way for everyone.

"People with a different genetic background may react to coffee differently," she said. "For some people maybe it's safe to drink a lot of coffee, but not for other people." Blood pressure expert Lawrence Krakoff of Mount Sinai Medical Centre in New York, said: "I don't think of coffee as a risk factor for high blood pressure."
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Friday, April 22, 2011

Free Starbucks Coffee for Earth Day

Friday will be a bit colder than temperatures we saw earlier this week. There may be areas of frost before 8 a.m., according to the National Weather Service. Friday will be partly sunny with a high near 49 degrees and an overnight low of 42. There is a chance of rain after 5 p.m.

We’ll see rain on Saturday with a chance of thunderstorms after 2 p.m. The high will be near 60 degrees and the overnight low will be 53. Sunday will be cloudy with a chance of rain. A high near 69 degrees is possible and the overnight low will be around 50.

Friday is Earth Day and Starbucks is offering you a great deal to celebrate. Bring a reusable mug to participating location and get free tea or hot or iced coffee. If you forget the mug, request one of the store’s “for-here” cups and you’ll be able to get your free coffee.

On Saturday, Patriots boys track competes in the Old Bridge relays at 8:30 a.m. At 9 a.m. Patriots girls track and Colonials boys track participate in the Monmouth County Relays at Middletown High School South. Patriots baseball plays Toms River South at home at 10 a.m., while boys lacrosse takes on Jackson at home at that time.

The Freehold Borough Recreation Commission will host its annual Easter Egg Hunt for children ages two to 12 years of age on Saturday at 10 a.m. at the St. Rose of Lima playground on Lincoln Pl. Admission is free.

Wemrock Orchards will host its annual Family Egg Hunt on Saturday at 11:30 a.m. There are over 2,000 eggs waiting for you and the young ones to find them. The cost to participate in the hunt is $2.
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Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Coffee cup scuffle

A coffee break almost turned into a break-up for a Palmerston North couple after their beverages became weapons during an argument. On November 14 last year, Palmerston North mother Jamie Rowena Henry, 31, sat down for a brew, but bad blood brewing between her and her partner soon saw the coffee being used in a two-way assault.

Her partner Grant James Newman, 29, a railway worker, knocked her cup into her mouth, causing the coffee to splash and spill all over her. Henry escalated the situation by throwing two cups at Newman, both of which he deflected without serious injury.

As the argument became more heated, police were called. Yesterday, at Palmerston North District Court, the pair stood side by side in the dock, each facing a charge of assault with a weapon. Judge Gerard Lynch convicted them both and gave them a suspended sentence, meaning they could be punished should they offend again in the next nine months.

Newman's lawyer Tony Thackery said the whole incident was just a fleeting episode between the pair and that they had since made amends. Both were now undergoing counselling, which Henry, who represented herself, said was going well.

Mr Thackery asked for a discharge without conviction but the judge ruled that out because police had been called to the couple's address on 11 previous occasions.

They have two children, aged 13 and six, and Henry is their primary caregiver. Alcohol was not a factor in the argument, Mr Thackery said. While it was not good to see the couple standing together in the dock charged with assault, the judge praised them for trying to sort out issues in their relationship and make "significant changes" to their lives.
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Wednesday, April 13, 2011

Tap for coffee and see what you get

Keeping track of coffee consumption isn't necessarily at the forefront of the minds of coffee drinkers. After all, anyone who has ever delved into the dark elixir has at one time or another--or every day as the case may be--subjected themselves to drinking an overabundance of coffee. Aside from being easy to do, it's fun; jittering through the day can produce some interesting consequences. However exciting that may be, sometimes we just want to see what we are getting ourselves into before we get into it.

Every coffee drinker knows just how much coffee is in the pot, but sometimes it helps to see the magic in action. The Viante CAF-05T Brew-N-View Coffee Maker harkens back to an earlier time when percolating coffeemakers allowed users to witness the progression from water to coffee. It features an illuminated viewing window, allowing a peek into the inner process of coffee-making and supplying an intriguing perspective for the daily activity.

Coffee drinking has of course become much more sophisticated in modern times, and has been integrated into every aspect of our lives; coffee is always nearby. Along those same lines, the coffeemaker incorporates an uncommon feature designed for quick and easy access to the brew: a dispensing tap. Along with a 24-hour timer and an automatic 2-hour safety shutoff, the up-to-date appliance makes it easy to see--literally--how coffee fits into the daily routine.
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Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Vietnamese coffee’s prestige enhanced in the world

VICOFA held a meeting in HCM City on April 9 to review business activities in the 2008-2010 tenure and devise orientations for the next tenure. According to the association, Vietnam exports around 1 million tonnes of coffee on average, with a export turnover of roughly US$2 billion, making up over 8 percent of the agricultural sector’s exports.

In the 2008-2010 tenure, VICOFA played an active role in linking production and consumption and contributed to the coffee sector’s sustainable development policies. From now to 2013, the coffee sector will face many challenges such as climate change, and price fluctuations which have affected the country’s coffee business.

VICOFA will focus on maintaining a coffee cultivation area of 500,000 hectares with an output of more than 1.1 million tonnes per year, holding a 15 percent share of the world’s coffee export market and promoting cooperation with major coffee growing nations in the world.

Priority Investment for 500,000 ha of coffee: Chairman of the Vietnam Coffee and Cacao Association (VICOFA) Luong Van Tu informed that the price of coffee is high at present, in London market : Robusta coffee US$2,600 / ton. Experts anticipate that the high price still remains high until the end of the drop…

However in the long terms, coffee producing has to face many difficulties : the area for growing old coffee trees is now 137,000 ha and has to be replaced within 10 years’time…This needs large capital and has to be done step by step..

The Chairman warned that if the re-cultivating job is not done well, the quantity of coffee production is severely reduced in the coming period. Thus, it is necessary to plan and stabilize the area for coffee tree cultivating around 500,000 ha, keeping the production from 1 to 1.2 million tons / per crop and setting a balance production between Robusta and Aribica ( grown in the high land area with the price 3 times more expensive than Robusta coffee), Tu said.
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Monday, April 11, 2011

Coffee studies should warm your heart

Looking for a reason to not give up your coffee habit? Here's one possibility: heart health. Numerous studies in recent years have reported that drinking coffee may be good for the cardiovascular system and might even help prevent strokes. Just last month, Swedish researchers announced results of a large study showing that coffee seemed to reduce the risk of stroke in women by up to 25%.

Not long ago, researchers thought quite the opposite about coffee and the heart, says Dr. Thomas Hemmen, director of the UC San Diego Stroke Center: "Coffee is fun and it tastes good, so people assumed for many years that it would be bad for you.

Studies conducted in the 1970s and 1980s offered little in the way of confirmation or refutation. Several suggested an increased risk of heart attack among coffee drinkers. Others showed a lowered risk of heart attack and stroke. Still others found no connection at all.

Many of these early studies were criticized for being too small or too brief. In response, researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health decided to look at coffee consumption, heart disease and stroke risk among more than 45,000 healthy men enrolled in the school's ongoing Health Professionals Follow-Up Study. Their analysis, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1990, found that coffee drinking had no effect on the men's risk of heart attack or stroke.

But in the last few years, a spate of studies has revisited the question, and many of them have found — unexpectedly — that coffee drinking is linked to a decreased stroke risk.

A 2008 study of more than 26,000 male smokers in Finland found that the men who drank eight or more cups of coffee a day had a 23% lower risk of stroke than the men who drank little or no coffee. And a few other reports suggest the effect applies to healthy nonsmokers too. Researchers at UCLA and USC examined data on coffee consumption and stroke prevalence among more than 9,000 participants in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. At a 2009 conference, they reported that the likelihood of stroke was highest among people who didn't drink coffee and lowest among those who drank the most coffee: 5% of people who drank one or two cups a day suffered strokes, whereas 2.9% of people who drank six or more cups suffered strokes. The study will be published in a few months.

Results from an even larger study of coffee drinking and stroke risk were published in the journal Circulation in 2009: Among the 83,000 women enrolled in Harvard's ongoing Nurses' Health Study, those who drank two to four cups of coffee a day had a 19% to 20% lower risk of stroke than women who drank less than one cup a month.

And this year, a study of more than 81,000 men and women in Japan showed that drinking one or two cups of coffee a day reduced the risk of death from cardiovascular disease by up to 23%. The findings were published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

Such studies reveal that coffee isn't harmful, as once thought, and might even be beneficial, says Dr. Larry Goldstein, professor of medicine and director of the Duke University Stroke Center. But while they show an association between coffee drinking and lower stroke risk, they still don't prove that coffee is the cause, he says.

"People who drink coffee are different in many ways from those who don't drink coffee," says Dr. Nerses Sanossian, one of the authors of the UCLA-USC study and a professor of neurology at USC.

Any one of those differences, or more than one of them, could be behind the apparently lower stroke risk. Some of the studies that show a link between coffee drinking and reduced stroke risk have also shown that coffee drinkers are more likely to smoke, have lower education levels and have diets higher in potassium. And although it's unlikely that smoking, for instance, is behind their reduced stroke risk, it's possible that something else is. "It may be due to some other factors we haven't even taken into consideration," Sanossian says.

Even though coffee is considered safe, even in large amounts, you shouldn't rush to take up the habit, says Mark Urman, a cardiologist at the Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute. "If you're not a coffee drinker, don't start drinking to prevent a stroke or otherwise," he says. Coffee can cause heart palpitations in some people, and withdrawal symptoms in those who try to skip their daily cups for a day or two. And many people, he adds, like to load their coffees with cream and sugar, which could very well counteract any advantage coffee has for the blood vessels and heart.

Definitive proof that coffee is good for the blood vessels is unlikely to emerge anytime soon, Hemmen says. Such studies would need to randomly select people to drink either a lot of coffee or a little coffee, and then researchers would have to closely monitor their coffee intake and health for decades.
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Thursday, April 7, 2011

Like caffeine? There's a gene for that -- two of them, actually

Attention coffee drinkers: If you think your craving for a cuppa joe stems from sleepiness, habit or simply a desire to make Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz an even richer man, you are sorely mistaken. A team of researchers from Harvard, the National Cancer Institute and other esteemed institutions of biological science reports that our need for caffeine is in our DNA. As if there were any part of our lives that weren’t subject to genetics in some form or fashion.

But back to the so-called caffeine genes. There are two of them, according to a report published Tuesday in PLoS Genetics.The first is CYP1A2, which had already been known to have something to do with caffeine metabolism, and the second is AHR, which plays a role in regulating CYP1A2.

Everyone has both of these genes, of course, but we don’t all have the exact same kinds. Those in the study who had the most caffeine-seeking version of CYP1A2 drank an average of 38 milligrams more of the stuff each day than those with the most caffeine-indifferent version. People with the most caffeine-dependent version of the AHR gene consumed an average of 44 mg. more per day than their counterparts with the least caffeine-seeking version.
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Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Fast food breakfast? Think twice about having that coffee‎

If your morning commute usually includes a greasy breakfast sandwich and a stiff cup of joe, here's another reason to trade it all in for a fruit cup. A new study from the University of Guelph found that chugging a coffee after a fatty meal of fast food can spike blood sugar in a healthy person to a level similar to those at risk of diabetes. Eating a greasy meal, we already knew, caused spikes in blood sugar. But the dangerous cocktail of caffeine and grease doubles the impact.

Researchers at the University of Guelph say that eating saturated fat makes it harder for the body to clear sugar from the blood - drinking coffee, even a couple of hours later, only makes that job harder. "This shows that the effect of a high-fat meal can last for hours," said Marie-Soleil Beaudoin, a PhD student who conducted the study with University of Guelph professors Lindsay Robinson and Terry Graham.

In the study, published in the Journal of Nutrition, participants were given a special fat beverage, and then asked to eat a meal with a sugar drink six hours later. Typically, the body should produce insulin to remove sugar from the blood. (People with diabetes do not produce enough insulin.)

But with the high-fat beverage in their system, the blood sugar levels in participants were 32 per cent higher than those who had not consumed any fat. And in the second part of the experiment, when participants were also asked to drink two cups of coffee five hours after the fatty drink and then down a sugar beverage, blood sugar levels were 65 per cent higher than the control group.

"Having sugar remain in our blood for long periods is unhealthy because it can take a toll on our organs," said Ms. Beaudoin, in a release from the university. The study, she said, stresses the need for people at risk of diabetes or with the disease to avoid both high-fat foods and limit their caffeine.
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Friday, April 1, 2011

Coming Soon To Your Mug: Temperature-Regulating Coffee Widgets

Coming Soon To Your Mug: Temperature-Regulating Coffee WidgetsA couple of engineer buddies have designed the latest must-have accessory for the coffee drinker. Joulies are metallic beans you drop into your hot cup of coffee to make it exactly 140 degrees. They haven't even been manufactured yet, but already the project has accumulated some $35,000 in Kickstarter cash. I guess a lot of people are tired of blistered tongues.

Each Joulie is a small metal shell filled with a phase-change material that melts at 140º Fahrenheit. (Some people might prefer 155º -- perhaps there will be a version for us.) So the Joulies absorb heat from the coffee till they reach 140º, and then start emitting heat. The effect (if you put in enough Joulies for your volume of beverage) is to maintain the coffee at the desired temperature for long enough to savor it. Using an insulated cup is recommended also.

We've seen this idea before, in the form of Fraunhofer's Perfect Coffee Mug, but this time it seems poised to actually come out of the lab and into your cup.
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