Kids, Coffee and ADHD, A Cure in A Cup?
Christie Haskell, blogger for Cafe Mom’s “The Stir” gives her seven year old son coffee first thing in the morning and follows it up with an extra dose later in the day. She revealed her “treatment” for her son’s ADHD on ABC News.
Mrs. Haskell claims that coffee keeps her son focused in the classroom and helps keep his behavioral issues in check. In short, she is using caffeine to treat his ADHD. She claims it works like a charm.
“He doesn’t overreact if we ask him to pick up Legos, rather than screaming and throwing himself on the floor,” Haskell told ABC. “And if we ask him to sit down and do homework, he can actually do it.”
Common symptoms of ADHD include inattentiveness, impulsivity and hyperactivity. A recent study released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that nearly one in 10 American children are diagnosed with ADHD. Traditionally this disorder is treated with Ritalin and behavior therapy. However as many as two-thirds of kids diagnosed with ADHD have used some form of alternative treatment, according to the NY Times.
Coffee May Lower the Risk of Stroke in Women
According to a new study in the Journal Stroke, women who drink at least one cup of coffee a day reduce their risk of stroke by as much as 25%.
Susanna Larsson of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm conducted the study. She followed more than 34,000 Swedish women aged 49 to 83 who were free of heart disease for 10 years. After the post-decade follow-up, there were 1,680 women who had had strokes. The study found that the women who drank at least one cup of coffee each day had a 22 to 25 percent lowered risk of stroke as compared to the women who drank less. The study also suggested that coffee can help prevent cognitive decline and can boost vision and heart health. It is also related to a reduced risk of liver cancer.
I feel healthier already!!! Drink to your health!
5 Health Reasons To Drink Your Coffee
We love our coffee! That goes without saying, it tastes great, perks us up and makes everyone else bearable on a Monday morning. But the immediate benefits of coffee are not the only reasons to love it.
Kerri-Ann Jennings, M.S., R.D., Associate Nutrition Editor at EatingWell Magazine has given us five health reasons that we should not stop drinking coffee. Here they are:
1. It protects your heart:Moderate coffee drinkers (1 to 3 cups/day) have lower rates of stroke than noncoffee drinkers, an effect linked to coffee’s antioxidants. Coffee has more antioxidants per serving than blueberries, making it the biggest source of antioxidants in American diets. All those antioxidants may help suppress the damaging effect of inflammation on arteries. Immediately after drinking it, coffee raises your blood pressure and heart rate, but over the long term, it actually may lower blood pressure as coffee’s antioxidants activate nitric acid, widening blood vessels.
2. It diverts diabetes: Those antioxidants (chlorogenic acid and quinides, specifically) play another role: boosting your cells’ sensitivity to insulin, which helps regulate blood sugar. In fact, people who drink 4 or more cups of coffee each day may have a lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes, according to some studies. Other studies have shown that caffeine can blunt the insulin-sensitivity boost, so if you do drink several cups a day, try mixing in decaf occasionally.
3. Your liver loves it: OK, so the research here is limited, but it looks like the more coffee people drink, the lower their incidence of cirrhosis and other liver diseases. One analysis of nine studies found that every 2-cup increase in daily coffee intake reduced liver cancer risk by 43 percent. Again, it’s those antioxidants—chlorogenic and caffeic acids—and caffeine that might prevent liver inflammation and inhibit cancer cells.
4. It boosts your brain power: Drinking between 1 and 5 cups a day (admittedly a big range) may help reduce risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease, as well as Parkinson’s disease, studies suggest. Those antioxidants may ward off brain cell damage and help the neurotransmitters involved in cognitive function to work better.
5. It helps your headaches: And not just the withdrawal headaches caused by skipping your daily dose of caffeine! Studies show that 200 milligrams of caffeine—about the amount in 16 ounces of brewed coffee—provides relief from headaches, including migraines. Exactly how caffeine relieves headaches isn’t clear. But scientists do know that caffeine boosts the activity of brain cells, causing surrounding blood vessels to constrict. One theory is that this constriction helps to relieve the pressure that causes the pain, says Robert Shapiro, M.D., Ph.D., associate professor of neurology and director of the Headache Clinic at the University of Vermont Medical School.
So go ahead, drink up and live long!
Study Shows Coffee Reduces Diabetes Risk in Women
Coffee produces a protein which appears to regulate sex hormones in women, in turn, reducing their risk of developing diabetes, according to a study released by UCLA. The protein has been shown to protect against diabetes.
The study found women who drank four cups of coffee a day were less than half as likely to develop diabetes than those who did not drink any coffee. Decafinated coffee did not appear to produce the same effect on the risk on diabetes.
Studies Show Coffee Use Can Help Reduce Disease Risk
The Harvard School of Public Health has released an observational study showing that moderate coffee consumption can help reduce the risk of developing certain diseases including diabetes, heart disease, Parkinson’s disease, gallstones, liver cancer and cirrhosis.
The study was based on researchers drawing conclusion based on differences between the number of disease cases in coffee drinkers versus non-drinkers.
The Harvard University School of Health has an
infographic which includes Health Benefits, Health Risks, Caffeine Comparisons, and a Facts & Statistics a page addressing each disease the study indicated was affected by coffee consumption.
Coffee Lowers Risk of Gout in Older Women
Coffee is good for a lot of health conditions, that is a fact. Now Reuter’s Health is reporting that Boston Researchers have found that it is also helpful in reducing the risk of gout in older women.
“The risk of gout was 22 percent lower with coffee intake of 1-3 cups a day and 57% lower with a coffee intake of more than 4 cups a day” compared to those with no coffee consumption, the authors wrote in the August 25 issue of American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Coffee, consumed over a course of years, can reduce the risk of gout in post-menapausal women by up to 50%. Gout occurs in about 1 in 20 post-menapausal women. It is a painful condition caused from the buildup of uric acid in the blood which crystallizes and deposits itself in the body, usually the feet.
“The pain is described as one of the most severe pains a human being experiences, like a breaking bone. You can’t walk and even the weight of a bed sheet is not bearable,” lead author, Dr. Hyon Choi of Boston University’s School of Medicine, told Reuters Health. He had previously done studies on the effects of coffee on gout in men. Those studies showed that coffee was beneficial in the reduction of gout in men.
Coffee May Decrease Risk of Neck and Head Cancers
A new study in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention has shown that coffee drinkers have another reason to celebrate! Coffee may decrease the risk of neck and head cancers.
In this study, scientists looked at the results of nine previous cancer/caffeine studies (using coffee and tea) to come up with their findings. Results show that those who drink a lot of joe have a lower rate of head and neck cancer. In each of the pooled studies the participants with cancer were compared to healthy persons in the general populations and hospitalized persons who did not have cancer. Overall the rate of cancer was 12% lower in people who drank coffee as compared to their no-joe counterparts. This number comes after taking into account certain other factors such as cigarette smoking.
The more you drink, the better! The study found that those who consumed more than four cups a day had their risk of cancer reduced by more than a third.
For cancer of the voice box, or larynx, coffee didn’t seem to play a role; nor did tea or decaffeinated coffee for any type of head and neck cancer.
The data does not conclusively prove that coffee itself protects against cancer. There could be other factors associated with coffee drinking that explain the lower cancer risk, or cancer sufferers might have decreased their coffee intake for some reason. “Besides caffeine, coffee contains more than a thousand chemicals,” the researchers reported in the journal Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, adding that the compounds cafestol and kahweol may be protective against carcinogens that would normally damage our genes.
The odds of getting this type of cancer are slim. In the U.S., only about 1 in 10,000 develops the disease every year.
SOURCE: http://cebp.aacrjournals.org/ Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention, June 22, 2010
Study Says Coffee NOT Linked To Colon Cancer
The Journal of the National Cancer Institute published the findings of a study on coffee and colon cancer online on May 7, 2010. The result was good news. Coffee is NOT linked to colon cancer so go ahead and drink up.
“Cutting down or removing sugar-sweetened beverages from the diet was viewed as a major target for preventing major cancers,” noted Dr. Barry Popkin of the University of North Carolina, who was not involved in the study.
Harvard researchers used data from several previous studies and followed some 700,000 people for up to 20 years after they had reported their dietary habits. Fewer than one in a hundred developed colon cancer, and neither coffee nor soft drinks influenced that rate appreciably.
“Drinking coffee, even more than six cups a day, was not associated with risk of colon cancer,” said Dr. Xuehong Zhang of the Harvard School of Public Health, who worked on the study. The findings, published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, square with earlier research for coffee.
For the heaviest tea drinkers, who drank at least four cups a day, the risk of developing colon cancer rose by 28 percent, on average. However, that link could be due to chance, or factors that the researchers didn’t measure –whether or not people put sugar and milk in their tea, or had pastries with it, for example.
“The relationship between tea and colon cancer is unclear for the time being,” said Zhang.
Coffee: Good or Bad for Weight Loss?
Coffee is typically only 5 calories a cup. Add the caffeine and its a great boost for your weight loss regimen. But, without thinking about it, you can sabotage coffee’s benefits to your bottom line.
According to Men’s Health, most people can add on 400 or more calories by ordering specialty coffee drinks. Whipped cream and specialty syrups can really pile on the calories. even with watching what you eat, you must count in the calories you drink as well.
http://health.yahoo.com/experts/eatthis/49512/unhealthiest-coffee-drinks-in-america/
Heartburn and Coffee Issues?
Coffee is loved nationwide. However, some people have problems enjoying it because of it gives them heartburn. I too have had this problem. was able to find a stomach friendly coffee at www.honeybean.comthat helped me. Its called Cophee and is a reduced acid coffee. A lot of people suffer from this, enough that a study has been done.
European scientists have discovered a chemical in coffee that actually inhibits acid production in the stomach. They found this while doing research on the stomach-irritating chemicals in coffee.
“The major import of our work is that it provides scientific evidence that you can produce a more stomach-friendly coffee by varying the processing technology,” said study author Veronika Somoza, professor and chair of the Research Platform of Molecular Food Science at the University of Vienna, Austria.
The results of this study were presented yesterday at the American Chemical’s Society annual meeting in San Francisco.
The scientists looked at coffee’s effect on human stomach cells using a variety of preparations, including dark-roast, regular roast, decaffeinated and stomach-friendly. Instead of one single element, they identified a mixture of compounds — caffeine, catechols and N-alkanoly-5-hydroxytriptamides — as the chemicals in coffee that promote the production of stomach acid.
But a fourth chemical, N-methylpyridinium, which is more common in dark roasts, such as espresso and French roast blends, was found to inhibit acid.
N-methylpyridinium is a product of the roasting process itself, resulting in dark roasts that are less likely than lighter ones to cause stomach irritation, according to the research.
In furthering this research, the scientist plan on experimenting on human coffee drinkers to see if these findings translatete into real life coffee drnkers.
Dr. Joseph Vinson, a professor of chemistry at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania who has studied the antioxidant properties of coffee, said the study suggests the possibility of a less troublesome brew.
“Cell studies can be legitimate. They can lead to human studies that will say the same thing,” said Vinson. “She [Somoza] has figured out a research approach that is one way to do it, and it’s a question of whether it is relevant to the human realm.”
Vinson predicted it will be.
“There’s more than enough data [in the study] to make it interesting,” said Vinson. “There can be this special coffee that doesn’t bother you.”
Take Heart in Coffee
The results of a study on coffee’s effect on cardiovascular disease will be presented by the American Heart Association at their 50th Annual Conference. The new study found that drinking coffee can regulate heart rhythm problems, reducing the number of hospitalizations related to this condition.
”People who reported four or more cups a day had almost an 18% reduction in the risk of being hospitalized for rhythm disturbances,” says Arthur Klatsky, a senior cardiology consultant at Kaiser Permanente Division of Research in California. Experts add that coffee drinkers should consider having a good diet and exercise routine for maximum results.
In the past it was believed that drinking coffee caused disturbances in heart rhythms although some experts still believe that regular coffee drinkers are at a higher risk for heart attacks. Dr. Klatsky believes that at this point, heart rhythm problems should not be associated with coffee consumption.
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