Not just coffee

Posts Tagged caffeine

A Study, A Study, A…Coffee

Jan 26

Posted by admin in coffee, health

With so many studies aligning the benefits of coffee with a reduced risk of certain diseases, someone finally asked the question–what happens when milk is added? Do the benefits disappear? The short answer is: No problem. No affect or even effect!

Now for the complexity part of the equation: It was instant coffee that was studied. the trial included 9 people–do 9 people constitute a trial?? The conclusion is sweet: Adding milk or cream does not affect the antioxidant benefits from the coffee.

Time to get serious. Coffee has a long list of benefits and, of course, some negatives. Nothing’s perfect! Yet a study with so few people and one that uses instant coffee grabs my attention just for the sheer joy of another eventual positive coffee report. Nothing else; nothing further.

Time to do a larger milk trial. Nestle sponsored this one: Think they should consider a bigger one as the teaser info works in their favor!coffee

Me, I drink it black. The stronger, the better.

Piling up the antioxidants!

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Round Up: Food News To Use

Jan 24

Posted by admin in food universe, news

So many leftovers. Time to consolidate all that information.

Yes, this was definitely the week that was; as in you were warned by Starbucks that prices would increase. They did. You may not have noticed the 5 cents here and there and some drinks jumped more than that, but it’s the caffeine that counts, right?

At the same time they got hit for the price jump, albeit with warning, they continued to tweak their healthy menu items. A few simple adjustments on your latte orders, like switching to nonfat milk, can keep the calorie count down. Actually they have lots of company in the new calorie-posting lifestyle. Look at Applebee’s new healthy choice list with the long title: “Unbelievably Great Tasting & Under 550 Calories.” That’s a mouthful.

Grocers continue to parade around their value-pricing deals and low-calorie combinations. FreshDirect, the online grocer in New York, touts its 500-calorie meals which they create in-house and have available for delivery.siteaccess_farms_02

Results are in that people do pay attention to calorie postings, but they are being questioned for their exactness. Several reports have questioned the validity of the numbers. Think this is where commonsense has to rein. If it looks too good to be true…Guess what the triple burger might actually have more than 100 calories! I see more fruit options as commonsense sides to accompany main courses.

Celebrity Food Shows have been touting the combination of waffles and fried chicken. Now that has become a menu buzz. Do you get two separate plates so they syrup does not run all over the crispy chicken? This is what we call a fad; not a trend!

As the weather continues lashing out at us with a full deck of impossibilities, (tornadoes in CA?), it’s time to begin the magical pre-spring daydream: Seed catalogs. This is the time of year to leaf through them and find the best possibilities for your eventual garden. Time to order and begin the slow sprout. So many catalogs and so many new veggie and fruit possibilities. This is your year to rotate and bring on some new choices. Skip the all-traditional garden and go for some of the newcomers–all well marked. Just verify the growing zone so CA crops do not sit idle in your mid-Atlantic garden! Can one really have too many tomatoes?

Always a few more food recalls to focus our attention. This week it was cheese logs, smoked beef brisket, and additional burger items. With the appointment of the new FDA deputy commissioner in charge of upgrading food safety, maybe, just maybe, we can start to see better focused attention and action.

Speaking of burgers: Here’s a new burger bar prototype to consider: Burger King and Budweiser have teamed up to open a Whopper Bar by mid-February in South Florida. If it works there…the rest is history: Tourist areas get ready to open a cold one! It’s a success in Germany and new one is planned for Spain.

Oatmeal continues to be everyone’s favorite bowl game. McDonald’s, Caribou, Starbucks, and Jamba Juice are all tripping over each other with the flavor possibilities and price wars. What happened to good Old Quaker at home–OK, the one minute kind in a to-go cup–even less expensive!

Rest up a new week in food is ready to entice.

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Let’s Talk Green Tea

Jan 16

Posted by admin in beverages, health, news

OK, OK, I know coffee is an important lifeline for me, but every so often, like when I’m shivering cold, nothing is finer than a cup of tea with honey. It’s probably because I’ve had so many hot cups of coffee by then that I need to trick the system. So it’s tea, and it’s mostly green. I let it seep way longer than the 3 minutes several companies recommend.

Let it Seep, let it Seep. OK, too much coffee already.

Green tea is a health writer’s favorite beverage. There have been articles about its staying power for all kinds of ailments, illnesses, and diseases.

Saw one this morning that may provide an interesting combination: Continue smoking–BAD–and drink Green Tea–Good. Sometimes these studies (this one is hospital-based from Taiwan as a follow-up to an earlier epidemiological study) just spell trouble for analysis.

With smoking still fairly common in numerous cultures, it would seem that those individuals consequently at risk for lung cancer could help themselves a bit with a cup of green tea. If they are so committed to continuing to smoke, then maybe they should keep a pot of green tea on the burner at all times as the study found that smokers who did NOT add this beverage had a 13-fold increased risk of lung cancer. Nothing to ignore.

For non-smokers, green tea has its own list of healthy attributes from its antioxidant powers and studies that link it to helping with cancer, heart, and diabetes.

One of the most popular green tea games is using the Matcha powdered green tea which has a beautiful, strong, powerful green color. So many commercial grade green teas are almost pale, an essence of green, in color. Brewing Matcha can turn a basic drink into an expensive pleasure, but one with the highest antioxidant attributes.surlatable

If tea’s your pleasure, you can spend a considerable amount of time in the tea aisle: So many flavor choices as this continues to be a burgeoning beverage market.

Keep the honey dipper handy!

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Fruit to Sleep

Dec 18

Posted by admin in health, life

Everyone knows caffeine is bad late at night; it keeps you awake. That is unless your body is conditioned to enjoy it as part of a great dinner or a special, soothing hot beverage to cap an evening. It’s conditioning. Coffee is the enemy and keeps you awake only if you let it! Trust me. I live the late-nite double espresso existence.

What if  you are on the other end of the spectrum? What if the caffeine gets you? What then helps you fall asleep and sleep soundly? There are those that suggest a warm glass of milk instead of the hot coffee. Or the camp that says a bowl of cereal–milk again tops the list for its calcium-inducing factors. How about other strategies to help awaken the melatonin and get the sleep juices going?

A new report says a handful of dried cherries or even a banana about an hour before bedtime does the trick. No wonder the Grand Traverse Resort and Spa in Traverse City, Michigan offers a cherry massage. It’s a natural! Also not coincidental that this is the location of the annual National Cherry Festival. Not a difficult food to honor!  Tasty and good for you: A perfect combination.cherry

Sleep well.

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My Healthy Cup of Coffee

Dec 16

Posted by admin in coffee, health, lifestyle, news

BialettiCappuccinoMkrJB08If you read enough of my blog, you know I love the health studies: Those that favor my caffeine addiction and love for my other favorite beverages: wine and champagne. Today is another lucky day as the latest study, this time from Australia, reviewed 18 prior studies and received data from 500,000 people. The conclusion is divine:  Coffee is Good. Not just good tasting or that it is responsible for a wonderful, wafting aroma, but that it is a beverage with significant health benefits. YES!

There are plenty of studies that have such small sample sizes you only hope the results hold up. Not this one. The numbers are impressive.

This particular research found that 4 cups of coffee or tea lowered the risk of Type 2 Diabetes! It gets better: Each cup reduced the likelihood of getting diabetes by about 7%. The simple translation: 3-4 cups of coffee daily reduces diabetes by about 25%. They found that those who consumed more than 3-4 cups of decaf lowered their risk by about one-third. If it’s tea you prefer, 3-4 cups of tea lowered the risk by one-fifth. Now there’s no need to hesitate having that 3rd or 4th cup!

An earlier study from Harvard reported that men who drank 6 or more cups of coffee a day had a 60% lower chance of getting prostate cancer! Coffee, the frequent villain of numerous discussions, has been elevated to an important position in the scientific literature and in our lives.

Now if you add 2 teaspoons of sugar to each cup of coffee…That’s another study.

I’m sure someone is trying to figure out that metric right now!

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Not My Sacred Caffeine

Dec 12

Posted by admin in alcohol, health

We’ve been lucky lately with the good news surrounding coffee and even some positives directly talking about caffeine. Then there is the pre-holiday murmur, that coffee will not help the headache and other aches and pains coming from too much partying.

The news gets worse: Coffee may NOT help you sober up! Now we have a serious problem. What about all those mornings after when you went to a multitude of college parties? How did you make it back to the world by morning? Coffee, right.

The lead author wants to dispel the myth because he feels people will believe that they can drive now that they’ve had the magical elixir (coffee, caffeine). Or he worries they’ll think they are operating at full capacity in all matters because they’ve had the cup! The study believes the combination of alcohol and coffee  solves little and may actual create residual problems.

Note that the people in the study had the equivalent of eight cups of coffee.illy

That’s some serious alcohol-caffeine partnering!

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Offers Keep on Comin’

Dec 8

Posted by admin in food universe

With the heavy burden of shopping and the anxiety of seasonal crowds, it’s only natural that there are some tasty enticements to get us to take a break and relax a little. Here are a few morsels:

–Dunkin’ Donuts celebrates the season with a new flavor: Peppermint Mocha Latte. They also have a special $1.99 small hot latte offer for the new drink and their other choices such as Caramel or Mocha Swirl til the end of the month. Don’t forget that the Peppermint one comes topped with whipped cream and a little mocha squiggle.

–IHOP decided their coffee needed an extra holiday buzz: They’ve added four new flavors to ease our caffeine habit: Hazelnut, French Vanilla, Irish Cream, and Swiss Mocha. They also decided to sweeten their pancakes with several new flavors such as gingerbread and eggnog hotcakes.

–Bruegger’s Bagels does not want to miss the sweet boat and has two new flavors: a Cinnamon Roll Bagel which gets topped with vanilla icing. They also introduced a Cinnamon Cream Coffee.

–Krispy Kreme brought back their snowman-shaped doughnuts.promoSmallSnowman07_B

These are just some sweet thoughts. So many more.

Guess no one thinks we should be watching the calories. All these super-sweet choices should help us reach a sugar high within minutes!

Think I’m there.

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A Needed Crackdown

Nov 16

Posted by admin in FDA, news

It’s so easy to continue to slam the FDA–I practically have a whole file of blogs devoted to food or beverage issues where they have been MIA or just plain late to the party. In a few instances, they wiggled around the complexity of the issue. Yet, every once in a while, I am encouraged. Today is one of those days.

Caffeinated alcoholic drinks have been questionable products for some time, and now, at the urging of numerous state attorneys general, the FDA is going to take action. They have finally figured out that scrutiny is needed, and their letter to 30 beverage companies marks the beginning of a commonsense approach to a serious behavioral safety issue.

They plan to study the safety and legality of these booster beverages. It goes like this, caffeine has been approved in soft drinks as long as it does not exceed 200 parts per million. The caffeine-added alcoholic beverages have questionable scientific approval, and the law specifically states an additive, in this case the caffeine, cannot be considered safe unless it has received prior FDA approval. Caffeine has not been approved as an additive in alcoholic beverages.

Several large alcohol beverage companies (Anheuser-Busch, MillerCoors) took their alcohol-energy drinks off the market well in advance of this Agency scrutiny, tiltbut not without prior negative publicity. There are currently no shortage of such combo high-powered drinks. For instance, Tilt is still available, but without the caffeine.

Beverage safety remains an appropriate concern. Without scientific evidence and valid data, it is questionable whether these “drugs,” or so-called beverages, can remain in the marketplace.

You know how much I love my caffeine, but this type of caffeine booster has become a safety concern: A combination of an additive to an already potentially powerful beverage.

This is no ordinary caffeine high.

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Farm Market Pizza

Oct 30

Posted by admin in lifestyle, news

What a fun treat: A visit to a farm market and a Margherita pizza hot out of the oven. Yes, I’m talking about the newest approach to the mobile van or the food truck. An actual pizza oven inside a truck enabling transport, portability, and a wood-fired dish.

The folks at Euro Gourmet have figured out how to take their wood-burning pizza oven on the road. They currently burn oak and applewood and plan to add more fruitwoods as they give off such wonderful flavors naturally. To the delight of the Sunday crowds at market, they’ve made a good decision. They offer two pizza sizes and several different toppings (such as funghi) pizzaTrailer-back-l-sidein addition to the wonderful, mozzarella-topped Margherita. Hot, fresh pizza in a matter of minutes!

Fold and eat. Now if they could just bring along the Illy machine, we’d be able to weather the conditions a little longer and savor our espresso and hot pizza: A perfect combination.

What’s not to like!

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Starbucks in the Victory Lane

Oct 20

Posted by admin in coffee, Economy

It’s almost impossible to miss the outpouring of Starbucks ads centered around the new instant superstar, the Via. At least the company hopes that this will be star quality (this product has been touted for over a half a year now).

viaThe ads show an upbeat flair matching the belief that there’s a lot of anticipation surrounding the intro. Besides seeing it already in full display at Costco, it’s receiving attention from end-of-season campers who feel they have solved one of their biggest fears–no hot coffee. Of course, they could just follow Billy Crystal (“City Slickers”), and grind their own tentside.

There’s also news that the early clock cleaning reports from both McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts may now be a piece of past history. The only negative news lately is that some songs have not been promoted as heavily as artists would like. Not everybody’s complaining.

As Starbucks sales continue to improve, we might be able to use that piece of news as an economic barometer: Is the economy back on track to support our caffeine habit?

Love it, as the ads say,”A product you can get through TSA.”

As long as airlines still offer hot water, we’ve got a match.

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