Liver cancer is the fastest-growing cause of cancer deaths in the United States, according to new data from the American Cancer Society. About 41,000 new cases of liver cancer are…
Category: Caffeine in Food
Find out if caffeine is the new wonder drug in our food supply. Is it harmful or helpful? And get detailed information, complete with charts, about how much caffeine is in the foods you eat and in the beverages you drink.
If there are any health benefits of green tea —and that’s a big “if”— how much of what you drink may matter. “Consume enough of the tea polyphenols, one of the important active…
“Drinking coffee could reduce your risk for dementia,” ran the headline in Fortune magazine last October. In a study that tracked more than 6,000 women aged 65 and older for…
People who consume more caffeine seem to have a lower risk of Parkinson’s disease. “That has been clearly established in multiple studies,” says David Simon, a neurologist at the Harvard…
Soft drinks, coffee, and tea aren’t the only sources of caffeine. The attention-boosting chemical is also found in chocolate drinks and candy, too. But the amounts can be pretty small.…
Caffeine is the most popular drug in the United States and the least regulated one.
Up until about two decades ago, the only foods with added caffeine were soft drinks. And the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) limited their amount of caffeine to 48 milligrams per eight ounces.
That changed in 1997, when the first popular energy drink—an Austrian import called Red Bull— landed on our shores. Every 8.4-ounce can of the sweetened fortified water contains 80 mg of caffeine.
Green tea is hot. You can buy a bottled green tea beverage just about anywhere these days. And food manufacturers are adding green tea or its extracts to everything from coffee to juice drinks.
How good is the evidence regarding the benefits of green tea and your health? Studies in laboratory animals are impressive, but compelling evidence in humans has been hard to come by.
Drinking tea regularly may be one of the most practical lifestyle changes you can make to significantly reduce your risk of suffering a stroke,” says epidemiologist Lenore Arab of the University of California at Los Angeles. Arab co-chaired the Fourth International Scientific Symposium on Tea and Human Health in 2007.
Tea is in. The average American drinks some 155 cups a year. That makes tea the country’s fourth most popular beverage, after water, soft drinks, and coffee.
There is no doubt that tea is an invigorating drink – probably due to how much caffeine is in tea (about half the caffeine of coffee).
And the national waistline would be far better off if we replaced some of that soda with tea (provided we sipped it with little or no sugar).
Most people rely on caffeine to stay alert. But researchers suggest that it may do far more—lowering the risk of Parkinson’s disease and gallstones, for example. Here’s what you may not know about the times that caffeine is good for you.
* This information does not apply to women who are pregnant (or trying to become pregnant) or to children. Nor does it apply to caffeine powder or highly concentrated liquid caffeine, which can be lethal.
More than 80 percent of American adults consume caffeine regularly. That’s no surprise, what with a coffee shop seemingly on every corner and in every supermarket, and tiny $3 bottles of 5-hour Energy popping up like mushrooms wherever there’s a checkout counter. It turns out, though, that there is also caffeine in ice cream and frozen yogurt.
How does caffeine work in the body?
Caffeine works mainly by temporarily binding to adenosine receptors in the brain. That prevents adenosine, which is a natural sedative produced by the brain, from occupying those receptors and making us feel drowsy. Adenosine levels build up during waking hours and then drop as we sleep.
People who don’t use caffeine regularly and who haven’t developed a dependence on it “usually become significantly more alert and better able to perform cognitive and motor tasks – such as paying attention during boring tasks or typing – if they’re given the right dose of caffeine,” says Laura Juliano, a professor of psychology at American University in Washington, D.C.