Drinking a cup of coffee before working out can have beneficial effects, including helping to ease the pain associated with physical exercise. Robert W. Motl, a professor of kinesiology and community health at the University of Illinois, examined 25 men who had an intense cycling workout and found that a dose of caffeine before the workout resulted in less muscle soreness. The report is published in the April issue of International Journal of Sports Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism. "Exercisers might want to consider a shot of caffeine before a particularly tough or new workout," Motl said. In 2003, Australian researchers from the Australian Institute of Sport let cyclists sip cola or coffee instead of water as they pedaled, and those with the caffeine exercised longer.
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Germany’s Green Cross has produced a brochure extolling the benefits of coffee drinking. Among the benefits listed, it says coffee improves digestion and protects against age-related diabetes, Alzheimer’s Disease and cirrhosis of the liver. The brochure cites several studies on coffee consumption and notes that caffeine is an important element of coffee that offers important benefits including improving concentration and decreasing the risk of cirrhosis of the liver by up to 80% for those drinking at least four cups of coffee a day. It also notes that coffee contains the anti oxidant chlorogene acid, which it claims can almost halve the risk of contracting Alzheimer’s Disease.
Once again, it has been proven that coffee has great positive effects on the health of mice. According to a report in Cancer magazine, the University of South Florida conducted a study using 55 mice that had been bred to develop symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. Half the mice were given plain water, the other half water infused with caffeine. After two months, the mice that had been given the caffeinated water performed memory and cognitive tests as well as unimpaired mice of the same age that were not suffering from dementia. The researchers also discovered that levels of the beta amyloid protein, which is responsible for creating harmful masses in the brains of Alzheimer and dementia victims, were reduced by almost half.
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Professor Mel Rosenberg, a breath specialist at Tel Aviv University’s Sackler Faculty of Medicine has discovered that a component in coffee can actually prevent bad-smelling bacteria from creating bad breath. "Everybody thinks that coffee causes bad breath," "and it’s often true, because coffee, which has a dehydrating effect in the mouth, becomes potent when mixed with milk, and can ferment into smelly substances," Rosenberg said. Certainly, Rosenberg and his colleagues were expecting to find evidence that coffee breath is connected to bacterial interaction with saliva in the mouth. But what they discovered surprised them. "Contrary to our expectations, we found some components in coffee that actually inhibit bad breath," Rosenberg said. "The lesson we learned here is one of humility: we expected coffee would cause bad breath, but there is something inside this magic brew that has the opposite effect." The task now is to isolate the bacterial-inhibiting component and find a way to incorporate it into a new category of breath fresheners such as gum, mouthwash and breath mints. "It’s not the raw extract we will use but an active material within it," Rosenberg clarified.
The American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology reports that pregnant women who consume 200 milligrams or more of caffeine a day the amount in 10 ounces of coffee or 25 ounces of tea may double their risk of miscarriage. The lead author of the study, Dr. De-Kun Li, a reproductive and perinatal epidemiologist at the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research in Oakland, California, suggests that pregnant women may want to reduce their intake or cut it out entirely. "Stopping caffeine really doesn’t have any downside," Li said. It is well known that caffeine crosses the placenta and reaches the developing baby, which cannot metabolize caffeine like an adult. For this reason, there has been much controversy on how much caffeine is safe for the developing baby if any at all. But this is the first study which links caffeine and miscarriage. Recently the American Pregnancy Association weighed in on the benefits of drinking herbal tea during pregnancy and concluded along with several recent studies that not only do most herbal teas pose no risk to the developing child and mother, but herbal teas can also play a central role in strengthening the uterus muscles, decreasing the length of labor and decreasing the number of interventions used such as artificial rupture of membranes (AROM), assisted delivery, and cesarean delivery, as well as provide important vitamins and minerals like calcium, iron, vitamin D, K and C. They do, however, caution that expecting mothers should consult with their midwife or Doctor before starting a strict regimen of herbal tea.
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