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The Coffee Thread

Timble2

Timble2

Imaginary Person
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If they're right watch out for me on the 'World's oldest person thread' in around 2075. I'll also be on the 'World's most jittery person' thread.


At: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3540729.stm

Coffee is 'health drink' says Italian

By Mark Duff
BBC News, Milan

Coffee is good for the heart, says Trombetti - but avoid instant
It is a daily routine for millions of Italians - the morning cup of espresso brewed on the kitchen hob or downed swiftly in a cafe on the way to work.

But for years their favourite way of kick-starting the day has had a bad press - most recently when it was reported that doctors had told British Prime Minister Tony Blair to drink less coffee.

Now it seems the tide is turning.

Forget the scare stories, says dietician Chiara Trombetti, of the Humanitas Gavazzeni institute in the northern Italian town of Bergamo.

There is sound scientific reason to enjoy your morning espresso without worrying about the health effects.

Coffee can be good for you - she says - and the stronger, the better.

That is why she recommends an espresso rather than a very un-Italian cup of instant.


Scientific evidence

Dr Trombetti says she hates the stuff herself - but points to a welter of scientific evidence to back her case.

Coffee contains tannin and antioxidants, which are good for the heart and arteries, she says.

It can relieve headaches.

It is good for the liver - and can help prevent cirrhosis and gallstones.

And the caffeine in coffee can reduce the risk of asthma attacks - and help improve circulation within the heart.

There is no denying that coffee is not for everyone.

If you drink too much it can increase nervousness, and cause rapid heartbeat and trembling hands.

Pregnant women, heart patients, and anyone with a stomach ulcer are usually advised to avoid it.

And even Dr Trombetti says no one should drink more than three or four cups a day. ...................
Click to expand...
 
Well I guess I will live forever because I drink lots of coffee without the bad side effects!!
 
Coffee is 'health drink' says Italian
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Double Hoorah!!!! That's the best news I've heard in ages. I looooooooooooooooove coffee and I think it's reciprocated.



And even Dr Trombetti says no one should drink more than three or four cups a day. ...................
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D'oh!
 
If you drink too much it can increase nervousness, and cause rapid heartbeat and trembling hands.
Click to expand...

If I drink any it seems to do that:cross eye

my last cup was a week last friday, incidentally
 
>>It is a daily routine for millions of Italians - the morning cup of espresso>>

a little bit of folkloristic stereotypes in this sentence, i'll say?
from my experience i would say coffe in the morning is a daily routine for millions of people all over the world, not only amongst us pictoresque italians

i mean, i am clinically dead before i drink my first coffee in the morning. but i have seen similar zombies in america and the uk. am i wrong?
 
Well OF COURSE coffee is a health drink! This isn't news to me. The stronger the better! And without all that yuppie latte carmel macchiado foo foo drink stuff.

If I could, I would wake up and lie directly under the espresso machine and say "ahhh."
 
None of that 'foo foo' style coffee for me either.
Sweet, some mik and espresso juice only...
:D
 
How strange that the French have banned the sale of Red Bull because of the "dangers" of caffiene :rolleyes:
 
I liked the bit about coffee curing headaches. I get headaches when I don't drink coffee.

I think it's a sign of being chemically dependent. :hmph:
 
But caffeine is an added ingredient in some headache relievers. I think that is where they get that.
 
AndroMan said:
I liked the bit about coffee curing headaches. I get headaches when I don't drink coffee.

I think it's a sign of being chemically dependent. :hmph:
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Andro they have help for that nowadays, you know. Just check in to the nearest detox unit near you. :likee: It will be ok, I promise. We are all here to support you. :D
 
inkedmagiclady said:
Andro they have help for that nowadays, you know. Just check in to the nearest detox unit near you. :likee: It will be ok, I promise. We are all here to support you. :D
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Give up coffee?

This is Holland! It's either that, or Heineken :eek!!!!:
 
I'm with Inked. If I could, I'd have it on a drip, but it just gets cold.

I LOOOOOOOOOOOOOVE COFFEEEEEEE!
 
Give up Coffee!! Thou speaketh blasphemy. To the flames for thy heresy!!!:madeyes:
 
My birthday is a national holiday in Columbia. :)


Oh, and I've decided to move to Italy. :)
 
:splat:

I guess they will never let me near the Middle East, nor america...

But this is not new, the benifits of coffee have been known for some time.

(All pause while Homo Aves does the full four hour Cha no ryu.)
 
My first ever full cup of coffee was about 9 months ago (I was 34 at the time) and that was only cos the machines at work dispense tea that looks like mushroom soup and tastes like old towels.

I am on about 4 or 5 cups a day now but I dont seem to notice if I go a few days without any form of caffeine.
 
Chriswsm said:
I am on about 4 or 5 cups a day now but I dont seem to notice if I go a few days without any form of caffeine.
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You are a lucky, lucky person. Either that, or you ain't drinking the right stuff ;)
 

Kopi Luwak
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Kopi Luwak are robusta coffee beans which have been eaten by and passed through the digestive tract of the Common Palm Civet. This process takes place on the islands of Sumatra, Java and Sulawesi in the Indonesian Archipelago.

"Kopi" is the Indonesian word for coffee and "Luwak" is local name of this animal which eats the raw red coffee 'cherries' as part of its usual diet. This animal eats a mixed diet of insects, small mammals and fruits along with the softer outer part of the coffee cherry but does not digest the inner beans, instead excreting them still covered in some inner layers of the cherry.

Locals then gather the beans -- which come through the 'animal stage' fairly intact -- and sell them on to dealers. It is believed that enzymes in the stomach of the civet add to the coffee's flavour through fermentation of some type.

The bean is usually given a light roast so as to not destroy the complex flavours which develop through this process.
Click to expand...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kopi_Luwak


Published online: 27 July 2004; | doi:10.1038/news040726-5

Cat droppings yield chic coffee

Emma Marris

Discovery shows unusual beans can be created in the guts of different civet species.

A food scientist has cracked the secrets of the world's most expensive coffee, Kopi Luwak, whose beans pass through the intestinal tract of an Indonesian civet before being roasted and savoured. But the elusive blend looks unlikely to be copied any time soon.

The beans, which cost over US

Kopi Luwak
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Kopi Luwak are robusta coffee beans which have been eaten by and passed through the digestive tract of the Common Palm Civet. This process takes place on the islands of Sumatra, Java and Sulawesi in the Indonesian Archipelago.

"Kopi" is the Indonesian word for coffee and "Luwak" is local name of this animal which eats the raw red coffee 'cherries' as part of its usual diet. This animal eats a mixed diet of insects, small mammals and fruits along with the softer outer part of the coffee cherry but does not digest the inner beans, instead excreting them still covered in some inner layers of the cherry.

Locals then gather the beans -- which come through the 'animal stage' fairly intact -- and sell them on to dealers. It is believed that enzymes in the stomach of the civet add to the coffee's flavour through fermentation of some type.

The bean is usually given a light roast so as to not destroy the complex flavours which develop through this process.
Click to expand...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kopi_Luwak


Published online: 27 July 2004; | doi:10.1038/news040726-5

Cat droppings yield chic coffee

Emma Marris

Discovery shows unusual beans can be created in the guts of different civet species.

A food scientist has cracked the secrets of the world's most expensive coffee, Kopi Luwak, whose beans pass through the intestinal tract of an Indonesian civet before being roasted and savoured. But the elusive blend looks unlikely to be copied any time soon.

The beans, which cost over US$1,000 a kilogram, are eaten and passed by the Asian palm civet (Paradoxurus hermaphroditus), which is a musky, tree-climbing cat-like creature. The supply of Kopi Luwak has always been tiny, but political turmoil in Indonesia has strangled production even further: less than 230 kilograms of the coffee are now being made each year.

Massimo Marcone, a researcher at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, wondered whether it might be possible to reproduce the effect that the Indonesian civets have on the coffee. He searched the world for another place with both coffee plants and civets, and hit upon Ethiopia, where coffee itself was born.

"It was something I was just dreaming up," he says. "Where else do we have coffee and the cat in a similar place?" In a forthcoming issue of Food Research International1, Marcone describes how he brewed coffee from beans that he personally picked out of the faeces of African civets (Civettictis civetta) and compared it with a mug of Kopi Luwak.

Marcone found that in both cases the civets' digestive action broke down proteins in the beans into smaller molecules that added to the flavour and aroma of the coffee on roasting. Some proteins were leached out of the beans completely, making the resulting coffee less bitter.

Bragging rights

Kopi Luwak was not as easy to copy as Marcone had hoped: the guts of the Indonesian civets did a much more thorough job of breaking down the proteins than did the digestive systems of the African civets.

But Marcone also discovered that the slow passage through the bacteria and enzymes in the civet's gut is similar to a method of fermenting coffee called the wet process. They even use the same agent: lactic acid bacteria.

Kopi Luwak is earthy, musty, syrupy, smooth and rich, with both jungle and chocolate undertones
Click to expand...

He is sure that he could tweak the wet process to be a better approximation of the inside of a civet, perhaps by using the same strains of lactic acid bacteria. But he is not sure the simulation is worth it. "If we were able to develop it, you would lose the bragging rights that this is the rarest and most expensive coffee in the world," he says.

And ultimately, it is those bragging rights that matter. Despite being described by some as "earthy, musty, syrupy, smooth and rich, with both jungle and chocolate undertones", Marcone admits that Kopi Luwak is "different from, but not better than, other coffees".



References
Marcone M.. Food Research International, in press, (2004).
Click to expand...
,000 a kilogram, are eaten and passed by the Asian palm civet (Paradoxurus hermaphroditus), which is a musky, tree-climbing cat-like creature. The supply of Kopi Luwak has always been tiny, but political turmoil in Indonesia has strangled production even further: less than 230 kilograms of the coffee are now being made each year.

Massimo Marcone, a researcher at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, wondered whether it might be possible to reproduce the effect that the Indonesian civets have on the coffee. He searched the world for another place with both coffee plants and civets, and hit upon Ethiopia, where coffee itself was born.

"It was something I was just dreaming up," he says. "Where else do we have coffee and the cat in a similar place?" In a forthcoming issue of Food Research International1, Marcone describes how he brewed coffee from beans that he personally picked out of the faeces of African civets (Civettictis civetta) and compared it with a mug of Kopi Luwak.

Marcone found that in both cases the civets' digestive action broke down proteins in the beans into smaller molecules that added to the flavour and aroma of the coffee on roasting. Some proteins were leached out of the beans completely, making the resulting coffee less bitter.

Bragging rights

Kopi Luwak was not as easy to copy as Marcone had hoped: the guts of the Indonesian civets did a much more thorough job of breaking down the proteins than did the digestive systems of the African civets.

But Marcone also discovered that the slow passage through the bacteria and enzymes in the civet's gut is similar to a method of fermenting coffee called the wet process. They even use the same agent: lactic acid bacteria.

Kopi Luwak is earthy, musty, syrupy, smooth and rich, with both jungle and chocolate undertones
Click to expand...

He is sure that he could tweak the wet process to be a better approximation of the inside of a civet, perhaps by using the same strains of lactic acid bacteria. But he is not sure the simulation is worth it. "If we were able to develop it, you would lose the bragging rights that this is the rarest and most expensive coffee in the world," he says.

And ultimately, it is those bragging rights that matter. Despite being described by some as "earthy, musty, syrupy, smooth and rich, with both jungle and chocolate undertones", Marcone admits that Kopi Luwak is "different from, but not better than, other coffees".



References
Marcone M.. Food Research International, in press, (2004).
Click to expand...

http://www.nature.com/news/2004/040726/full/040726-5.html


-So has anyone here tried Kopi Luwak?
 
:cross eye that's put me off coffee for life.

interested by the scientific name for the asian palm civet:
Paradoxurus hermaphroditus
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surely not really hermaphroditic?!

[edit] further investication turns up the following:

Both sexes have well-developed anal scent glands looking somewhat like testes, which gives the musang its species name.
Click to expand...
 
IMHO coffee is horrid stuff wherever its been.

<sips mug of Lapsongsuchow>
 
Is there a ‘Starbucks Effect’ on traffic?
Craving for morning coffee adds to some commutes
By Katherine Shaver

Updated: 12:24 a.m. ET April 18, 2005Almost every morning for a decade, Roger Bratter has stopped at a Starbucks in Gaithersburg to sip a grande latte sans foam or a green tea and spend 20 peaceful minutes with the newspaper before heading to his auto repair shop.

Grabbing a cup at home, he said, just isn't the same.

"Our kid's got to go to school. My wife has to get to the Metro. I've got to get to work," Bratter, 54, said during a 7:30 a.m. visit last week. "If I have to make [coffee] and clean it up, it's just an extra stress factor."

Minutes earlier, at the same Starbucks on Quince Orchard Road, Steve Elgin, 41, pulled into the drive-through. A venti latte once or twice a week takes the edge off his one-hour commute between Frederick and Gaithersburg. "It gives me something to do on [Interstate] 270," said Elgin, an executive in an insurance claims company.

The two men represent what one researcher says is evidence that the national craving for gourmet coffee may be adding mileage to the morning rush hour. And the numbers might be significant enough to complicate efforts to reduce traffic congestion, save fuel and reduce air pollution.

She calls it -- what else? -- the "Starbucks Effect."

"If you see people replacing an in-home activity like brewing your own coffee with an activity that requires a new [car] trip, that's not exactly the trend we're looking for," said Nancy McGuckin, a travel behavior analyst who used U.S. Department of Transportation data to develop her findings.

McGuckin built her thesis from the department's National Household Travel Survey, a periodic study of about 70,000 households in which each member keeps a diary of comings and goings -- who's driving where, how far and for what purpose.

What McGuckin and two colleagues found in comparing the 1995 and 2001 surveys, the two most recent ones, was that 1.6 million new more Americans tacked personal errands onto their commutes. Studies have long shown that errands are an integral part of the daily routine, especially on the way home from work, when arrival times are more flexible. Women continue to outpace men in these trips, shouldering most of the early-evening family tasks after leaving the office, such as grocery shopping and picking up children.

Morning errands
But they also discovered that for the first time most of the growth in errands occurred during the morning commute -- and far more men had joined in.

A closer look revealed that many of those men had destinations more enjoyable than the dry cleaner. While younger men were sharing in more household-related errands such as ferrying children, older men were devoting many of their morning trips to coffee and such portable breakfast food as bagels.

The Starbucks Effect is, of course, not just about Starbucks, although Starbucks opened more than 4,000 locations worldwide between 1995 and 2001, the two years the travel researchers used for comparison.

In addition to its effect on mileage, the boom in on-the-go breakfasts has confounded attempts to forecast travel patterns, which are based on computer models that rely heavily on the predictability of the morning commute. Those models assume that people take the shortest, fastest routes to work, not the ones that necessarily lead past a doughnut shop.

"How do we predict future travel when commercial and social interactions like this can surprise us?" McGuckin asked.

Not everyone who has studied these trends is convinced that there has been a change big enough to affect traffic patterns or pollution. Fast-food restaurants, after all, have catered to morning commuters since McDonald's introduced the Egg McMuffin in the 1970s.

Alan E. Pisarski, author of "Commuting in America," said that although McGuckin's findings are noteworthy, he doubts that coffee-and-bagel-seeking commuters are running up much extra mileage. Most people don't have to drive far out of their way for coffee, he said, and their engines probably remain warm enough during those relatively brief stops to prevent high-polluting "cold starts" -- the engine ignitions at the beginning of trips that produce the dirtiest exhaust
Click to expand...

More at the originating site:

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/7538321/
 
Coffee 'boosts female sex drive'

Coffee could help boost a woman's sex drive, a US study says. Scientists from Southwestern University found it increased the female libido in experiments on rats.

The Pharmacology, Biochemistry and Behaviour journal study said the effect was caused by coffee stimulating the part of the brain regulating arousal.

But researchers said a similar effect was only likely to be repeated in humans who do not drink coffee regularly.

Previous research has looked into both the health benefits and consequences of coffee consumption.


Humans would have to drink 10 cups of coffee in one go to get the same effect and that is not the normal consumption level
British Coffee Association spokesman

The hot drink is linked to improving memory and reducing the risk of cancer, but studies have also suggested it increases the risk of heart disease.

In the latest research, scientists gave 108 female rats a moderate dose of caffeine before a mating test to determine if the caffeine had any effect on female behaviour.

They found that administration of caffeine shortened the amount of time it took the females to return to the males after sex for another mating session.

The study said the effects appeared to go beyond a simple boost of energy for socialising, but researchers said the effect may not be repeated in all humans.

Brain

Lead researcher Dr Fay Guarraci said: "These rats had never had caffeine before. In humans, it might enhance the sexual experience only among people who are not habitual users."

But she added the study should help improve understanding about the relationship between the brain and behaviour.

"Understanding the circuits that control this behaviour will help us understand how the brain works and what part of the brain mediates motivation because sexual behaviour is a motivative behaviour."

But a spokesman for the British Coffee Association said: "We are not that convinced by this. Humans would have to drink 10 cups of coffee in one go to get the same effect and that is not the normal consumption level.

"There are health benefits of coffee, but at this stage I do not think we can include this as one."




Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/h ... 628070.stm

Published: 2006/01/19 13:45:55 GMT

© BBC MMVI
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Edit to amend title. x2
 
No wonder Starbucks is so popular...

Cappucino, anyone? :)
 
Hmm - do they actually mean coffee or caffeine? I mean, is it something to do with caffeine when it's in coffee, or just caffeine in general? It's not all that clear from the article.
 
Great. One of my best kept secrets iis now out there...
 
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