Coffee – artdiamondblog.com

Diet Low in Fat and Sugar May Have Helped Morera Become Oldest Person in World

But at least it appears that she was able to keep drinking coffee. She also apparently embraced new technology and stayed intellectually sharp (maybe the coffee helped ;).

(p. A1) Maria Branyas Morera, an American-born Spanish woman believed to be the oldest person in the world, died on Monday [Aug. 19, 2024] in Olot, Spain. She was 117.

Her family wrote in a post on her X account that she had died in her sleep. She had been living in a nursing home.

“A few days ago she told us: ‘One day I will leave here. I will not try coffee again, nor eat yogurt, nor pet my dog,’” her family wrote in Catalan in the post. “‘I will also leave my memories, my reflections, and I will cease to exist in this body. One day I don’t know, but it’s very close, this long journey will be over.’”

. . .

Having been born before the emergence of the telephone, Ms. Branyas came to embrace the digital revolution, fashioning herself on social media as “Super Àvia Catalana,” or “Super Catalan Grandma.” She posted bite-size pieces of life advice, observations and jokes to thousands of followers.

In her biography on X, she wrote, “I’m old, very old, but not an idiot.”

. . .

Like many supercentenarians, Ms. Branyas became the subject of scientific fascination. Dr. Esteller, the researcher who studied her genetics and lifestyle, found that her genes were protective against DNA damage, and that she had low levels of fat and sugar in her blood — all of which he said was helpful for living a long life. His research also found that her cells aged much slower than she did, meaning that she had a lower “biological age” than her actual age.

The Catalan diet, which is similar to the Mediterranean diet and includes a lot of olive oil, has also been linked to longer survival, he said. He added that Ms. Branyas liked to eat yogurt.

“What do you expect from life?” a doctor once asked Ms. Branyas while retrieving blood samples for study, according to El País.

Ms. Branyas, unmoved, answered simply: “Death.”

For the full obituary see:

Ali Watkins. “Maria Branyas Morera, 117; Was Oldest Person in the World.” The New York Times (Friday, August 23, 2024): B11.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated Aug. 22, 2024, and has the title “Maria Branyas Morera, World’s Oldest Person, Dies at 117.”)

Almost 50% of Modern Drugs Have Their Source in Folk Medicine

(p. 17) At the heart of “Most Delicious Poison” is an evolutionary oxymoron that sustains life as we know it: Poisons — in deserts or rainforests, at the corner bar or in your fridge — threaten life while offering possibilities for persistence, and the pleasures that we take from substances that would otherwise be deadly hint at the ways life on earth manages to thrive in a landscape of toxins. . . .

“Scratch beneath the surface of a coffee bean, a red pepper flake, a poppy capsule, a Penicillium mold, a foxglove leaf, a magic mushroom, a marijuana bud, a nutmeg seed or a brewer’s yeast cell, and we find a bevy of poisons,” Whiteman writes.

Caffeine is another natural wonder best approached with caution. “Caffeine and the human mind,” says Whiteman, can seem like a match made in heaven. “Taken in the appropriate doses, caffeine not only feels life-giving but is: Drink a few cups a day and you won’t live forever but a little longer.” Whiteman sorts through data suggesting as much, though, anecdotally, on a fall morning in the dark, it sure feels true.

But caffeine can be deadly. In October of this year [2023], the parents of a University of Pennsylvania student with a congenital heart condition sued Panera Bread over their “Charged Lemonade,” on the grounds that a substance containing three Red Bulls’ worth of caffeine should have been marketed as an energy drink, potentially saving their daughter’s life.

And yet used in moderation, the poison that we drink in pumpkin spice lattes blocks adenosine receptors — adenosine being a brain-produced neurotransmitter that would otherwise encourage you to rest.

. . .

Big Pharma’s relationship to Indigenous knowledge is a recurring motif. “Indigenous healers have yielded nearly 50 percent of all modern drugs we use today,” writes Whiteman.

For the full review, see:

Robert Sullivan. “Toxic Relationships.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, December 24, 2023): 17.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review was updated Dec. 4, 2023, and has the title “All Things in Moderation, Especially When They’re Toxic.”)

The book under review is:

Whiteman, Noah. Most Delicious Poison: The Story of Nature’s Toxins―from Spices to Vices. New York: Little, Brown Spark, 2023.

Nimbly Resilient African Coffee Farmers Switch to Coffee Bean that Withstands Global Warming

(p. A1) First the bad news. The two types of coffee that most of us drink — Arabica and robusta — are at grave risk in the era of climate change.

Now the good news. Farmers in one of Africa’s biggest coffee exporting countries are growing a whole other variety that better withstands the heat, drought and disease supersized by global warming.

. . .

Catherine Kiwuka, a coffee specialist at the National Agricultural Research Organization, called Liberica excelsa “a neglected coffee species.” She is part of an experiment to introduce it to the world.

. . .

(p, A6) In 2016, she invited Aaron Davis, a coffee scientist from the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew, England, to Zirobwe. He was skeptical at first. He had tasted Liberica elsewhere and found it to be like “vegetable soup,” he said.

But then, the next day, he ground the beans from Zirobwe in his hotel room. Yes, a coffee researcher always packs a portable grinder when traveling.

“Actually, this is not bad,” he recalled thinking. It had potential.

. . .

Dr. Kiwuka and Dr. Davis teamed up. They would encourage farmers to improve the harvesting and drying of their Liberica crop. Instead of tossing them in with the robusta beans, they would sell the Libericas separately. If they met certain standards, they would get a higher price.

“In a warming world, and in an era beset with supply chain disruption, Liberica coffee could re-emerge as a major crop plant,” they wrote in Nature, the scientific journal, this past December.

For the full story, see:

Somini Sengupta. “Hardier Brew: African Farmers Bet on Climate-Resistant Coffee.” The New York Times (Saturday, April 29, 2023): A1 & A6.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date April 28, 2023, and has the title “What Climate Change Could Mean for the Coffee You Drink.”)

The article in Nature Plants mentioned above is:

Davis, Aaron P., Catherine Kiwuka, Aisyah Faruk, Mweru J. Walubiri, and James Kalema. “The Re-Emergence of Liberica Coffee as a Major Crop Plant.” Nature Plants 8, no. 12 (Dec. 2022): 1322-28.

Three Cups of Coffee a Day Lowers Risk of Death

(p. D6) That morning cup of coffee may be linked to a lower risk of dying, researchers from a study published Monday [June 6, 2022] in The Annals of Internal Medicine concluded. Those who drank 1.5 to 3.5 cups of coffee per day, even with a teaspoon of sugar, were up to 30 percent less likely to die during the study period than those who didn’t drink coffee. Those who drank unsweetened coffee were 16 to 21 percent less likely to die during the study period, with those drinking about three cups per day having the lowest risk of death when compared with noncoffee drinkers.

Researchers analyzed coffee consumption data collected from the U.K. Biobank, a large medical database with health information from people across Britain. They analyzed demographic, lifestyle and dietary information collected from more than 170,000 people between the ages of 37 and 73 over a median follow-up period of seven years. The mortality risk remained lower for people who drank both decaffeinated and caffeinated coffee. The data was inconclusive for those who drank coffee with artificial sweeteners.

“It’s huge. There are very few things that reduce your mortality by 30 percent,” said Dr. Christina Wee, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a deputy editor of the scientific journal where the study was published. Dr. Wee edited the study and published a corresponding editorial in the same journal.

. . .

The study showed that the benefits of coffee tapered off for people who drank more than 4.5 cups of coffee each day.

For the full story see:

Dani Blum. “Have a Cup of Coffee. It Could Extend Your Life.” The New York Times (Tuesday, June 7, 2022): D6.

(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 1, 2022, and has the title “Coffee Drinking Linked to Lower Mortality Risk, New Study Finds.” Where there are minor differences in wording between the versions, the passages quoted above follow the online version.)

The academic article summarized in the passages quoted above is:

Liu, Dan, Zhi-Hao Li, Dong Shen, Pei-Dong Zhang, Wei-Qi Song, Wen-Ting Zhang, Qing-Mei Huang, Pei-Liang Chen, Xi-Ru Zhang, and Chen Mao. “Association of Sugar-Sweetened, Artificially Sweetened, and Unsweetened Coffee Consumption with All-Cause and Cause-Specific Mortality.” Annals of Internal Medicine 175, no. 7 (July 2022): 909-17.

Advanced Colon Cancer Patients Lived Longer When They Drank Coffee

(p. D6) Researchers studied 1,171 patients diagnosed with advanced or metastatic colon or rectal cancer who could not be treated with surgery.

. . .

Compared with people who drank none, those who drank a cup a day had an 11 percent increased rate of overall survival, and a 5 percent increased rate of living progression-free. The more coffee they drank, the better. Those who drank four or more cups a day had a 36 percent increased rate of overall survival and a 22 percent increased rate of surviving without their disease getting worse. Whether the coffee was decaf or regular made little difference.

The study, in JAMA Oncology, controlled for race, smoking, alcohol intake, aspirin use, diabetes, and the addition of milk, nondairy creamers or sweeteners to the coffee.

For the full story, see:

Nicholas Bakalar. “Coffee for Better Outcomes.” The New York Times (Tuesday, September 29, 2020): D6.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated September 23, 2020, and has the title “Drinking Coffee Tied to Better Outcomes in Colon Cancer Patients.”)

The article in JAMA Oncology mentioned above is:

Mackintosh, Christopher, Chen Yuan, Fang-Shu Ou, Sui Zhang, Donna Niedzwiecki, I-Wen Chang, Bert H. O’Neil, Brian C. Mullen, Heinz-Josef Lenz, Charles D. Blanke, Alan P. Venook, Robert J. Mayer, Charles S. Fuchs, Federico Innocenti, Andrew B. Nixon, Richard M. Goldberg, Eileen M. O’Reilly, Jeffrey A. Meyerhardt, and Kimmie Ng. “Association of Coffee Intake with Survival in Patients with Advanced or Metastatic Colorectal Cancer.” JAMA Oncology (published online in advance of print on Sept. 17, 2020).

Coffee Gives Us “More Ideas, More Talk, More Energy, More Time, More Life”

(p. C4) After five centuries, we still have questions about coffee, but we agree on what we need it to do. Most of us drink coffee not because we have a finely calibrated understanding of its role in blocking the adenosine that makes us feel tired and increasing the dopamine that makes us feel good. Instead, we drink coffee because . . . of our bottomless desire for more ideas, more talk, more energy, more time, more life.

For the full commentary, see:

Augustine Sedgewick. “How Coffee Became a Modern Necessity.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, April 4, 2020): C4.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the same date and title as the print version.)

Sedgewick’s commentary is related to her book:

Sedgewick, Augustine. Coffeeland: One Man’s Dark Empire and the Making of Our Favorite Drug. New York: Penguin Press, 2020.

How Drinking Coffee Makes Us Younger and More Open-Minded

(p. C2) . . . , if a baby monkey heard a new sound pattern many times, her neurons (brain cells) would adjust to respond more to that sound pattern. Older monkeys’ neurons didn’t change in the same way.

At least part of the reason for this lies in neurotransmitters, chemicals that help to connect one neuron to another. Young animals have high levels of “cholinergic” neurotransmitters that make the brain more plastic, easier to change. Older animals start to produce inhibitory chemicals that counteract the effect of the cholinergic ones. They actually actively keep the brain from changing.

. . .

In the new research, Jay Blundon and colleagues at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tenn., tried to restore early-learning abilities to adult mice. As in the earlier experiments, they exposed the mice to a new sound and recorded whether their neurons changed in response. But this time the researchers tried making the adult mice more flexible by keeping the inhibitory brain chemicals from influencing the neurons.

In some studies, they actually changed the mouse genes so that the animals no longer produced the inhibitors in the same way. In others, they injected other chemicals that counteracted the inhibitors. (Caffeine seems to work in this way, by counteracting inhibitory neurotransmitters. That’s why coffee makes us more alert and helps us to learn.)

In all of these cases in the St. Jude study, the adult brains started to look like the baby brains.

For the full commentary, see:

Alison Gopnik. “MIND & MATTER; How to Get Old Brains to Think Like Young Ones.” The New York Times (Saturday, July 8, 2017): C2.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date July 7, 2017, and has the same title as the print version.)

The article co-authored by Jay Blundon and mentioned above,is:

Blundon, Jay A., Noah C. Roy, Brett J. W. Teubner, Jing Yu, Tae-Yeon Eom, K. Jake Sample, Amar Pani, Richard J. Smeyne, Seung Baek Han, Ryan A. Kerekes, Derek C. Rose, Troy A. Hackett, Pradeep K. Vuppala, Burgess B. Freeman, and Stanislav S. Zakharenko. “Restoring Auditory Cortex Plasticity in Adult Mice by Restricting Thalamic Adenosine Signaling.” Science 356, no. 6345 (June 30, 2017): 1352-56.

Culture Percolated Over Coffee

(p. A15) Shachar M. Pinsker, a Hebrew scholar at the University of Michigan, believes that cafés in six cities created modern Jewish culture. It’s the kind of claim that sounds as if it might be a game-changer, and there are enough grounds and gossip in “A Rich Brew” to keep this customer engrossed from cup to cup, . . .
Mr. Pinsker gets percolating at Signor Fanconi’s establishment in Odessa, an Italian café where women were unwelcome and Jews periodically excluded. The young Sholem Aleichem, arriving penniless from Kiev in 1891, found a marble table in the corner and started writing short stories that become the bedrock of Yiddish literature. What else went on in a Black Sea café? They “talk politics day and night . . . read newspapers from all over the world . . . and speculate on currencies and stocks,” writes Mr. Pinsker, drawing on letters of the cafe’s habitués. Isaac Babel found Fanconi’s “packed like a synagogue on Yom Kippur.” It got shut down by Lenin’s commissars.

For the full review, see:
Norman Lebrecht. “BOOKSHELF; A Remarkable Cultural Infusion; Sholem Aleichem found a table and wrote stories while all around him customers drank coffee, read newspapers and talked politics.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, June 29, 2018): A15.
(Note: ellipsis at end of paragraph, added; ellipses internal to paragraph, in original.)
(Note: the online version of the review was last updated June 28, 2018, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘A Rich Brew’ Review: A Remarkable Cultural Infusion; Sholem Aleichem found a table and wrote stories while all around him customers drank coffee, read newspapers and talked politics.”)

The book mentioned above, is:
Pinsker, Shachar M. A Rich Brew: How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture. New York: NYU Press, 2018.

“The Powers of a Man’s Mind Are Directly Proportioned to the Quantity of Coffee He Drinks”

(p. C9) . . . certain aspects of 18th-century Parisian life diluted the importance of sight. This was, after all, a time before widespread street lighting, and, as such, activities in markets (notably Les Halles) were guided as much by sound and touch as by eyes that struggled in the near dark conditions. Natural light governed the lives of working people, principally because candles were expensive. Night workers–such as baker boys known as “bats,” who worked in cheerless basements–learned to rely on their other senses, most notably touch.
. . .
“For Enlightenment consumers, a delicious food or beverage had more than just the power of giving a person pleasure,” writes Ms. Purnell; taste, it was held, could influence personality, emotions and intelligence. Take coffee, “the triumphant beverage of the Age of Enlightenm ent.” Considered a “sober liquor,” it stimulated creativity without courting the prospect of drunkenness. Sir James Mackintosh, the Scottish philosopher, believed that “the powers of a man’s mind are directly proportioned to the quantity of coffee he drinks.” Voltaire agreed and supposedly quaffed 40 cups of it every day. Taste was also gendered: Coffee was deemed too strong for women; drinking chocolate was thought more suitable.

For the full review, see:
MARK SMITH. “The Stench of Progress.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., MARCH 11, 2017): C9.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date MARCH 10, 2017.)

The book under review, is:
Purnell, Carolyn. The Sensational Past: How the Enlightenment Changed the Way We Use Our Senses. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017.

World Health Organization Praises Coffee, Reversing 1991 Warning

(p. A9) An influential panel of experts convened by the World Health Organization concluded on Wednesday [JUNE 15, 2016] that regularly drinking coffee could protect against at least two types of cancer, a decision that followed decades of research pointing to the beverage’s many health benefits. The panel also said there was a lack of evidence that it might cause other types of cancer.
The announcement marked a rare reversal for the panel, which had previously described coffee as “possibly carcinogenic” in 1991 and linked it to bladder cancer. But since then a large body of research has portrayed coffee as a surprising elixir, finding lower rates of heart disease, Type 2 diabetes, neurological disorders and several cancers in those who drink it regularly.

For the full story, see:
ANAHAD O’CONNOR. “Coffee May Protect Against Cancer, W.H.O. Concludes, in Reversal of a 1991 Study.” The New York Times (Thurs., JUNE 16, 2016): A9.
(Note: bracketed date added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date JUNE 15, 2016, and has the title “Coffee May Protect Against Cancer, W.H.O. Concludes.”)

“Better Coffee Rockefeller’s Money Can’t Buy”

“Page Morton Black, a cabaret singer, and William Black, the founder of the Chock Full o’Nuts company, in the early 1960s.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A17) For Gothamites of a certain vintage, it was . . . a part of life . . . — a jaunty little waltz, its lyrics connoting warmth, fiscal security and celestial reward:

Chock Full o’Nuts is that heavenly coffee,

Heavenly coffee, heavenly coffee.
Chock Full o’Nuts is that heavenly coffee,
Better coffee a millionaire’s money can’t buy.

Page Morton Black, the cabaret singer whose sprightly rendition of that song in radio and television ads was indelibly engraved on New Yorkers’ brains at midcentury, died on Sunday [July 21, 2013] at her home in the Premium Point enclave of New Rochelle, N.Y. She was 97.
. . .
Mrs. Black, the widow of William Black, the founder of the Chock Full o’Nuts company, curtailed her singing career after their marriage. But her voice lived on in the jingle, which was broadcast for more than 20 years.
. . .
The jingle’s original last line, “Better coffee Rockefeller’s money can’t buy,” was changed in 1957, after John D. Rockefeller Jr. and his family complained.
. . .
Chock Full o’Nuts, now owned by Massimo Zanetti Beverage USA, has revived the jingle, in a new arrangement, for its contemporary ads. The lyrics have been adjusted for inflation, with “billionaire” replacing “millionaire” in the last line.

For the full obituary, see:
MARGALIT FOX. “Page Morton Black, 97; Sang Heavenly Jingle.” The New York Times (Tues., July 23, 2013): B3.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added; jingle italicized and indented in print version of obituary, by not online version.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the title “Page Morton Black, Who Sang Heavenly Jingle, Dies at 97.”)