A CAFFEINE JOLT & AN ANTIOXIDANT BALM
Such a pleasant and familiar thought: a cup of coffee.
Coffee makes up nearly a third of all liquids ingested in the USA. Coffee vendors are on nearly every corner. For millions of people, the day can only be launched with the help of a cup of coffee.
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And as the toils of the day fatigue us, coffee can renew us, bring back strength to our tired limbs, reawaken our creativeness, and bring back our sense of humor.
Surely something as good as coffee, has to be bad for you. That would be the conventional wisdom. Caffeine is one of the most pharmacologically active compounds found in nature. But a flurry of scientific studies have now concluded that with a few exceptions, coffee (and caffeine) has surprisingly few, or no serious health consequences.
An occasional patient with recurrent cardiac arrhythmias would be advised to avoid coffee, but the studies have proven many old wives tales of the perils of drinking coffee to be unfounded, (when consumed in moderation, of course).
Two recent studies suggest that caffeine might even have an important beneficial role in preventing or reducing the progression of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. Caffeine added to the drinking water of mice with the rodent equivalent of Alzheimer’s disease resulted in a 50% reduction in the amount of abnormal beta amyloid plaques. Dr Arendash, who led the study at the Florida Alzheimer’s Research Center in Tampa, said: ” The new findings provide evidence that caffeine could be a viable ‘treatment’ for established Alzheimer’s disease, and not simply a protective strategy”. (1)
Researchers in Finland and Sweden examined the records of 1409 people whose coffee drinking habits had been recorded when they were at midlife. Those who drank three to five cups of coffee per day in midlife were much less likely to have developed dementia or Alzheimer’s disease in follow-up checks two decades or more later. (2)
Coffee’s great story does not end with caffeine. Consider the Antioxidants.
For over 1000 years man has cultivated coffee, picked the red cherries, squeezed the beans from the pulp, and dried the nearly tasteless green coffee in the sun. Then, the art of roasting the coffee in exactly the correct way, yielded the wondrous aroma and color and taste of the final product.
The roasting of coffee is not caramelization, unless a very dark roast is performed. At lower temperatures (310 degrees F) a collection of amino acids with six-sided rings, called chlorogenic acids are “fused” with plant sugars into the compounds that give coffee its aroma, its color, and its taste.
The temperature at which this heated reaction occurs (the Maillard reaction) corresponds with the commonly performed “medium roast”. The intensity of flavor and aroma is highest at this dark tan-colored stage. If roasting is continued, these compounds which yield the flavor, are diminished as the roasting temperature rises. Dark roasts have less caffeine and less flavor compound content, and they do have flavor added by caramelization.
The chlorogenic acids and many of the flavorful, aromatic compounds resulting from the Maillard reaction have a strong antioxidant activity.
Daily ingestion of coffee adds significantly to the benefits of ingestion of antioxidants and has been credited with certain beneficial health effects, including the reduction of colonic cancer and perhaps some protection against the progression of degenerative brain diseases such as Parkinson’s disease, dementia, etc.(1,2)
The chlorogenic acids that are unique to coffee are produced in highest concentration in full sunlight, at the lower elevations of the coffee belt.
Manufacturing the 1000 or so compounds found in the coffee cherry requires the full energy of the sun, and is only weakened when grown in the shade. “Makai” coffee from the lower elevations gives the distinct full flavor found in CUP O’ KONA, 100% Kona coffee, from Patrick Farm.
1. Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, Press Releases, 5 July 2009 , Caffeine reverses memory impairment in Alzheimer Mice. Gary Arendash, Ph.D., Florida Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center.
2. Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, Press Releases, 14 January 2009 , Midlife coffee and tea drinking and the risk of late life dementia. Sabina Bossi, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden. 3. Science Daily(Oct. 15, 2003) www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003
Highly Active Compound Found In Coffee May Prevent Colon Cancer. Thomas Hofmann, Ph.D., professor and head of the Institute for Food Chemistry at the University of Mnster in Germany, and Veronika Somoza, Ph.D., deputy director of the German Research Center for Food Chemistry in Garching.
2.www.Anti-Aging -Guide.com/41coffee.php. Anti-Aging Guide 2009
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