I Don’t Drink Coffee. Should I Start?

I Don’t Drink Coffee. Should I Start?

As someone who doesn’t drink coffee, I’m sometimes forced to ponder whether I’ve escaped an unhealthy addiction or if I’ve just been asleep my whole life.

Counting yourself out from the 64 percent of Americans who drink at least one cup a day can invite bewildered responses from dedicated coffee drinkers. To them, the benefits are clear, the drawbacks minimal.

Being in the minority, it’s easy to wonder: Have I been making a mistake? Should I and other coffee abstainers start now?

“There aren’t any guidelines to help guide you on this,” said Dr. Donald Hensrud, director of the Mayo Clinic Healthy Living Program. “This is kind of an individual decision.”

Darn.

While it would be nice if medical experts just took a side, it’s not that simple.

We do know that coffee has been linked to a variety of health benefits. A recent review of studies found that greater coffee intake was linked to a decrease in liver cirrhosis risk.

Add it to the pile of headlines. Coffee has been linked to, among other things, reducing tinnitus risk, increasing driver safety, cutting melanoma risk, galvanizing workouts, surviving colon cancer, living a longer life and avoiding death.

The medical consensus seems clear: Coffee is not unhealthy.

But experts tend to stop short of suggesting the uncaffeinated among us add it to our diets.

“It’s one thing to say it’s safe,” said Dr. Rob van Dam, an adjunct associate professor of nutrition and epidemiology at Harvard University. “It’s another thing to recommend it as a medical choice even though people don’t like it and they’d have to make an effort to adopt it. We’d need a different level of evidence to recommend it to people.”

Health benefits tend not to be on coffee drinkers’ minds when they drag themselves out of bed or hit a midafternoon slump. They just want to feel human again, I’m told.

“How do you even function in the morning?” a friend said when Iasked about coffee’s pros and cons on Facebook. “How did you even have the energy to type this status? Cannot compute.”

Part of the energy boost comes from simply addressing the withdrawal symptoms coffee drinkers have created, Dr. van Dam said. If you never create that addiction, then there is no need to raise your caffeine level to soothe it.

There are objective measures, however, that indicate increased mental performance after a cup of joe, Dr. Hensrud said. Processing speed and cognitive speed have been shown to improve. It has also been linked to decreased risk of depression.

But there are also potential downsides. Coffee is associated with side effects like insomnia, jitters or heartburn, and because people metabolize caffeine at different rates, it can be intolerable to some. If you have trouble falling asleep after a can of soda, coffee might not be for you.

You should not feel as though you’re missing out on potential health benefits, Dr. Hensrud said, especially if you don’t enjoy the taste. He said he himself didn’t start drinking coffee until he was about 30.

“I just looked at it as unnecessary,” he said, adding, “If you don’t like it, my goodness, it’s not worth it.”

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To meditate mindfully demands ‘‘an open and receptive, nonjudgmental awareness of your present-moment experience,’’ says J. David Creswell, who led the study and is an associate professor of psychology and the director of the Health and Human Performance Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University. One difficulty of investigating meditation has been the placebo problem. In rigorous studies, some participants receive treatment while others get a placebo: They believe they are getting the same treatment when they are not. But people can usually tell if they are meditating. Dr. Creswell, working with scientists from a number of other universities, managed to fake mindfulness.

First they recruited 35 unemployed men and women who were seeking work and experiencing considerable stress. Blood was drawn and brain scans were given. Half the subjects were then taught formal mindfulness meditation at a residential retreat center; the rest completed a kind of sham mindfulness meditation that was focused on relaxation and distracting oneself from worries and stress.

‘‘We had everyone do stretching exercises, for instance,’’ Dr. Creswell says. The mindfulness group paid close attention to bodily sensations, including unpleasant ones. The relaxation group was encouraged to chatter and ignore their bodies, while their leader cracked jokes.

At the end of three days, the participants all told the researchers that they felt refreshed and better able to withstand the stress of unemployment. Yet follow-up brain scans showed differences in only those who underwent mindfulness meditation. There was more activity, or communication, among the portions of their brains that process stress-related reactions and other areas related to focus and calm. Four months later, those who had practiced mindfulness showed much lower levels in their blood of a marker of unhealthy inflammation than the relaxation group, even though few were still meditating.

Dr. Creswell and his colleagues believe that the changes in the brain contributed to the subsequent reduction in inflammation, although precisely how remains unknown. Also unclear is whether you need to spend three uninterrupted days of contemplation to reap the benefits. When it comes to how much mindfulness is needed to improve health, Dr. Creswell says, ‘‘we still have no idea about the ideal dose.”

Squeeze in Omega-3s

Some nutritionists call it the anti-aging fat: Omega-3s help cells function properly, lower cholesterol, and fight inflammation, and in turn can reduce risk of cancer, heart attack, and stroke. AJournal of Nutrition study found that one omega-3, DHA (found in cold-water, fatty fish), is particularly helpful for maintaining the health of aging brains. Incorporate two 3-ounce servings of salmon, lake trout, herring, or other fatty fish in your weekly diet. Include daily servings of omega-3s from other sources, such as flaxseed, spinach, kale, or walnuts.

Fill up with fiber

The daily recommendation for fiber is 25 to 35 grams per day, but most Americans eat half of that or less. Not a good idea: Fiber may protect against cancer, promote heart health, and keepblood sugar levels steady. In an American Journal of Clinical Nutrition study, researchers found that each additional 10 grams of dietary fiber consumed daily reduced the risk of death from coronary heart disease by 17 percent. To increase your consumption, try fiber powerhouses like cooked lentils (8 grams per ½ cup), raspberries (8 grams per cup), or cooked chickpeas (6 grams per ½ cup).

Enjoy olive oil

Luckily, healthy veggies like kale and spinach taste wonderful with another powerhouse food: olive oil. A staple of the Mediterranean diet, olive oil contains the same powerful polyphenols antioxidants as many teas. Polyphenols may protect against certain cancers, such as breast and colon cancer. One study in the journal Neurology found that older people who regularly used olive oil for cooking, salad dressing, or with bread had a 41 percent lower risk of stroke then their peers who never consumed it. Related research has found that people who regularly consume olive oil are less likely to develop heart disease.

10 Mind-Blowing Facts About ‘The Godfather’

Posted on 24 Feb 2016

Young children will spontaneously invent tool behaviours to solve novel problems, without the help of adults, much as non-human great apes have been observed to do. The findings, from the University of Birmingham, are contrary to the popular belief that basic tool use in humans requires social learning.

Lev Vygotsky, one of psychology’s most influential representatives, claimed that humans only learn how to use tools by learning from others, including parents, and that children’s spontaneous tool use is “practically zero”. However, this study has proven said theory wrong.

The findings, publishing in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, are the first to investigate children’s tool-use abilities with great ape tasks.

The researchers based the tasks on tool behaviours observed in wild chimpanzees and orangutans, and mirrored them for 50 children aged between 2.5-3-years-old.

The findings also suggest that the cognitive abilities underlying these tool behaviours are shared by both humans and their closest living relatives.

The team found that in 11 of the 12 tasks children spontaneously invented the correct tool behaviour. They also found that those behaviours which occur frequently in wild great apes were also invented more frequently by the children, which indicates a large overlap in the physical cognition abilities of humans and great apes.

Eva Reindl, PhD student at the University of Birmingham’s School of Psychology, said, “We chose great ape tasks for three reasons: Firstly, they are unfamiliar to children. This ensures that children will have to invent the correct behaviour instead of using socially acquired, previous knowledge. Second, they are ecologically relevant and third, they allow us to make species comparisons with regard to the cognitive abilities involved.”

In one of the twelve tasks, children needed to use a stick as a lever to retrieve pom poms from a small box. Similarly, great apes use twigs to remove kernels from nuts or seeds from stingy fruits. The tasks could only be solved by using a tool, but children were not told that.

Dr Claudio Tennie, Birmingham Fellow, explained, “The idea was to provide children with the raw material necessary to solve the task. We told children the goal of the task, for example to get the pom poms out of the box, but we never mentioned using the tool to them. We would then investigate whether children spontaneously came up with the correct tool behaviour on their own.”

Miss Reindl noted, “While it is true that more sophisticated forms of human tool use indeed require social learning, we have identified a range of basic tool behaviours which seem not to. Using great ape tasks, we could show that these roots of human tool culture are shared by great apes, including humans, and potentially also their last common ancestor.”

In the future, the researchers will try to extend their findings by presenting children and great apes with tool tasks that are completely novel to any of these species, e.g. tasks based on tool behaviours observed in non-primate animals but not shown spontaneously by children or great apes.

Pathway to better metabolism discovered in fat cells

Control over obesity and diabetes may be one step closer thanks to a Hiroshima University study in fat tissue.

The research team of Professor Kazunori Imaizumi, PhD, at Hiroshima University has mapped the activation pathway for a protein responsible for burning excess energy in the body.

If the pathway can be confirmed in living animal studies, control of this pathway may lead to treatments for obesity and related metabolic diseases. Researchers studied mouse fat cells growing in a dish using a combination of chemical treatments and protein measurements.

Part of the pathway involves a protein found only in brown fat cells. Fat cells are classified as either brown or white. White fat accumulates during unhealthy weight gain, but some brown fat is essential for a healthy metabolism.

This protein in brown fat cells, called UCP1, is involved in the process of how warm-blooded animals maintain a stable internal body temperature. This process, called thermogenesis, involves burning excess energy inside the body rather than storing it as fat. More UCP1 means a higher metabolism and less weight gain.

Prof. Imaizumi's team investigated two proteins called IRE1alpha and XBP1 for their relationship to UCP1. When these proteins are active, they can increase the amount of UCP1 inside the cell. Researchers also identified other molecules that act even earlier in the control pathway.

These results provide strong evidence that somewhere within this cellular signaling cascade is the possibility for precision control of fat cells' metabolic process using UCP1.

Current treatments for metabolic diseases like Type 2 Diabetes and obesity rely on reducing the amount of energy entering the cells. These treatments focus on reducing white fat cells, which store excess calories. Treatments targeting UCP1 would be completely novel by increasing the amount of energy leaving the body. This would require the seemingly counter-intuitive method of increasing the number of the other type of fat cells, brown fat cells, like those used in Prof. Imaizumi's work.

"Brown fat cells dissipate excess energy in the form of heat. Therefore, having a large number of brown fat cells leads to an anti-obesity effect," said Rie Asada, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in Prof. Imaizumi's lab.

Prof. Imaizumi's research team is currently planning experiments to develop a more detailed understanding of the cellular pathways that lead to UCP1's metabolic actions within brown fat cells.

Story Source:

The above post is reprinted from materials provided byHiroshima University. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

What does the law say?

There’s no provision in the rules for companies to require people to return faulty goods in their original packaging. It’s quite normal for a customer to dispose of the packaging after they’ve bought something.

If a company tries to reject your complaint on those grounds, you should challenge them. If they won’t listen, threaten to take them to the Ombudsman - or even the courts.

The Consumer Rights Act makes it very clear that anything that anyone sells to you must be “fit for purpose” and of a “satisfactory quality”.

If you discover that something you bought is faulty, then the company that sold it to you must offer to repair or replace it if the fault comes to light in the first six months.

James Daley, director at Fairer Finance, a consumer group, said: "Retailers will often try and fob customers off - suggesting that the fault was caused by their own carelessness. But during the first six months after you’ve bought something, the onus is on the seller to prove that the fault was not present when the item was sold.

"Beyond six months, you may still be within your rights to get the seller to repair or replace the item, but the burden of proof switches to the customer to show that the fault was present when they bought the product."