Some Things You Didn’t Know About Coffee
• Caffeine Can Kill You — But you’d have to drink 80 to 100 cups in a hurry, health experts say.
• Caffeine Might Cut Pain — Moderate doses of caffeine — the equivalent of two cups of coffee — can cut post-gym muscle pain, a small study found. But the research was done on people who were not regular coffee drinkers.
• Caffeine Can Indeed Keep You Up at Night — Health experts advise avoiding it for 6 hours before bedtime.
• Coffee is a Source of Antioxidants — For people who eat a standard Western diet, coffee may be one of the healthiest aspects of their diet. That’s because coffee is quite high in antioxidants. Studies show that many people get more antioxidants from coffee than from fruits and veggies combined.
• Decaf Coffee Has Caffeine — If you drink five to 10 cups of decaffeinated coffee, you could get as much caffeine as from one or two cups of caffeinated coffee, a study found.
• Decaffeination Uses Chemicals — Beans are steamed so that dissolved caffeine rises to the surface, where it is washed off using an organic solvent called methylene chloride.
• Caffeine Is Not The Bitter Culprit — Caffeine is not the main bitter compound in coffee. Rather, the pungent perpetrators are antioxidants.
• Great Coffee Depends on Roasting and Brewing — When it comes to great flavor, coffee chemistry boils down to roasting and brewing. During roasting, oil locked inside the beans begins to emerge at around 400 degrees. The more oil, the stronger the flavor. Caffeine content goes up as the water spends more time in contact with the grounds, so regular coffee often has more of it than espresso or cappuccino.
• Coffee Was Discovered by Goats — A millennium ago on a mountainside in Africa, a herd of goats kept a shepherd up at night after feasting on red coffee berries. The shepherd took his animals’ discovery to some monks, and very long prayer sessions ensued. It’s a good story, anyway.
• Coffee Can Improve Physical Performance — It stimulates the nervous system, signaling fat cells to break down body fat. But it also increases adrenaline levels in your blood. This is the fight or flight hormone, which prepares your body for intense physical exertion.
• Coffee May Help You Live Longer — Several studies show that coffee drinkers have a lower risk of death. In two very large studies, drinking coffee was associated with a 20 percent lower risk of death in men and a 26 percent lower risk of death in women, over 15 to 20 years.
• Coffee May Help You Burn Fat — Caffeine is found in almost every commercial fat-burning supplement. It’s one of the few natural substances proven to aid fat burning. Some studies show that caffeine can boost your metabolic rate by 3-11%.
