lsA asked:


I normally grab a small latte to sit around and study, but my qualm is the weakness of the coffee. The truth is I only go to Starbucks because of the seating outside of home with a cup of caffeine. If the other coffee places near me had comfy seating, I would be there instead. However, I didn’t go today. Anyone notice an improvement, or did the training turn out to be lip service?

Nathaniel

Louanne Baelde asked:


Are you drinking too much coffee? We seem to need it to wake up in the morning, to stay alert when we drive, and even our work breaks are now referred to as “coffee breaks.” A sign that may indicate that we’re getting a little too carried away is when we have a mug, with a picture of our favorite mug on it. But don’t put your favorite cup away just yet. There’s new evidence suggesting that coffee in moderation can actually be good for you!

New evidence shows that antioxidants are not only in green tea, but are also in coffee. Surprisingly, there’s four times the amount of antioxidants in coffee as what there is in green tea. Of course this doesn’t substitute for the amount of antioxidants that you find in fruits and vegetables. But one to two cups of coffee per day lowers your chances of having cancer and chronic diseases.

Harvard University School of Public Health shows that the risk of Type II diabetes is lower among regular coffee drinkers. Why? It boosts the liver’s ability to break down sugar. Too much sugar that stays in our bodies not only causes us to gain weight, but also weakens muscle strength. And who wants saggy muscles?

Did you know that almonds lower your cholesterol and help to increase your memory? That’s right, a few of those delicious nuts with coffee, and it’s even more of a super memory booster! You actually have an 80% less chance of getting Parkinson’s disease. Parkinson’s drugs are now being developed with caffeine derivatives for this very reason.

In medicine, caffeine is used as a diuretic (to increase urine) and as a cardiac stimulant. It boosts energy and triggers alertness.

After a large cup of coffee, our muscles tighten up, our heart beats fast and our hands get cold. Coffee stimulates the brain like cocaine and heroin. That’s why it’s so addictive and for the same reason why most of us need it first thing in the morning, to start our day. Once you get into the coffee cycle, you can’t stop. If you try, you get a wicked headache and you start squirming like a snake.

But recent studies reveal that regular coffee drinkers are less likely to contract heart disease. “Until now, we have attributed the cardiovascular effects of coffee to caffeine, but we found non-coffee drinkers given decaffeinated coffee also display these effects,” says Roberto Corti, M.D., a cardiologist at University Hospital in Zurich. Then could there be other ingredients in coffee that are causing the “jitters”? If there is less elevation in blood pressure, could this mean that we are increasing our tolerance to caffeine? Should hypertensive people still drink coffee?

The American Heart Association agrees that there’s a lot of contradiction about caffeine and regular coffee drinkers and the link with cardiovascular disease. If you sit down and calculate how much caffeine you consume in one day, you might be surprised. But could only one or two cups of coffee be harmful for you?

According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, there is more risk for a heart attack if a regular coffee drinker carries a gene called cytochrome P450 1A2*1F. This gene metabolizes caffeine slowly. They have decided however, that more research still needs to be done before they can make this conclusion.

Dr. Florian Koppelstatter of the Medical University Innsbruck, in Austria, claims that caffeine boosts brain activity. Vanderbilt University also found coffee to increase blood flow to the brain thereby, preventing degenerative brain diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease.

Again, maybe there are some good benefits as long as we consume this beverage in moderation. Apparently, adding an extra paper filter in your coffee machine when brewing your coffee, even if you have a plastic filter, helps to lower cholesterol and your blood pressure.

We all know that coffee sometimes prevents constipation. Nothing like that morning brew to get things moving! Some practitioners in alternative health medicine actually suggest doing coffee ****** for bowel cleansing. Myself, I prefer bottoms up to be my cup!

Are we addicted to the coffee or to the lifestyle and habit that we’ve grown into over time? Well at least now we know that there are some healthy benefits.

But can having too much coffee and drinking the brew too late in the day cause insomnia? Without a good night’s sleep, our body can’t replenish itself. Let’s not forget the increased risk of osteoporosis for menopausal women. I think I’ll stick to my martinis and use the coffee grounds for something else.

I heard coffee grounds make good fertilizer in the gardens because they’re high in nitrogen. Use them to fertilize your evergreens, azaleas and rosebushes. Also coffee grounds mixed with orange peels placed around your plants in the garden will keep the cats away. You can even mix some carrot seeds with ground coffee when you sow and pests will stay away. Placing a small container or dish of coffee grounds in the freezer, rids your freezer of spoiled food smells. For you fishermen, coffee grounds mixed with earth will keep your worms wiggly.

Meeting new people and socializing with coffee is one of America’s favorite pastimes. From espressos to café lattes or ice cappuccinos, we keep thinking of new delightful ways to enjoy our quick fix. And now with convenient drive-thru coffee shops, it’s even easier to grab a mug on the go. The coffee places make fabulous meeting places for a quick chat, to play games, or to read the newspaper. Some go alone and others gather in groups. Ironically, we all go out of our way to have something that we can make fast and effortlessly at home.

A man and woman were in the kitchen having a discussion on who should brew the coffee in the morning. She suggested that he do it because he was the first to get up in the morning. “This way you won’t have to wait,” she said. He quickly replied, “You should do it. You usually do the cooking around here.” The wife walked out of the room for a moment and reached for the Bible and opened the New Testament. She pointed to the top of the pages and showed him that indeed it said, “Hebrews. “

So coffee lovers, as long as you drink your coffee in moderation, it doesn’t seem like it will hurt you. It’s apparent that it could benefit you. Studies have shown that coffee has amazing antioxidants, helps persons with bronchial asthma, increases the speed of rapid information, counteracts driver sleepiness, reduces the risk of stone formation and colon cancer, and is even a great source of potassium. Again the key word is moderation, like with everything. Too much of anything is not good.

So java junkies go ahead and drink up! Your coffee fits right in with its cousins tea and cocoa.



Donna

Elea Almazora asked:


Even though it may not seem like it, the times wherein I have the opportunity to write – simply write! – for my own pleasure, for the sheer love of it, have been getting fewer and fewer as the days go by. It used to be that I had the time and the energy skip over to the nearest coffee shop (Starbucks is a preference, of course) with a pretty hard bound brown paper journal and my trusty fountain pen with brown ink. But now, I realize that it’s been an entire year since I had the opportunity, much less the inclination to indulge in that. I’m rather saddened to discover that while I do on occasion type up updates and post them on my online journal, I no longer write the way I used to – and I used to write ever so beautifully.

This entire train of thought began last Saturday, when we were digging up a whole bunch of stuff at home because my mother wanted to sort through her clothes and we were going to buy new wooden closets for me and my sister. Cleaning out closets had always been a nostalgic activity for me, and, as I carefully boxed up the contents of my old closet, I rediscovered the old hardbound notebooks that I used to carry around and cover with fountain pen ink as I sipped my tall hazelnut latte on a comfortable plush chair in a fairly quiet coffee place. I no longer drink coffee, I realized; my stomach condition demands that I stick to tea, preferably green tea latte so that there would be no massively major upheaval of my gastrointestinal system. I also realized how long it had been since I last stopped thinking about what I was writing, last stopped pressing the backspace button, selecting entire passages of my life and pushing them out of my life with the delete button.

My handwriting was never beautiful, and I remember that I used to think that most of my ramblings and scribblings on those brown pages (I loved to imagine that they were papyrus, or any other special paper that poets and philosophers used to write on), would never compare to what had been written in centuries past. Then again, I fancy that my letters were not quite as studied as letters were expected to be in the past, and I suppose the honesty of the curves of my cursives do hold some inexplicable charm that is almost completely disconnected from the practically pretentious oblivious meanings of my first personal essays.

I read through what I had once written, moving my eyes fluidly over lines and gaps and spaces and jumps and thoughts that I will likely never have again, and I realized with more than a bit of surprise that as time progressed my thoughts had changed over the many months of my writing in those notebooks using that pen, relying on the flow of that ink. The meaning of the words began to reflect with the honesty of my letters, as if the act of seeing my own writing had inspired me to tap into my soul and trust what it was trying to say rather than what my own thoughts were trying to say (often, my thoughts edit, abridge, or exaggerate whatever it is I truly want to say). I was almost struck speechless at the revelation that I just may have lost that definite sense of self when I had chosen to let go of this habit, pushing it to the margins in favor of placing my work at the center of the page.

The idea that the activity I had so loved before bearing the brunt of a responsible life having fallen off the proverbial book of my life was, at that point, equal parts terrifying and hilarious. I closed the last of the old hard-bound journals covered in essays, words, phrases and poems; it went into the brown box, and I wondered whether I should keep my memories in a place where they would be less likely forgotten. I also wondered how honest I had been these past few months, with all my disclaimers and edits in my thoughts, working more like a word processor than a human mind.

I’m swinging by the bookstore later, I suppose, and buy a new notebook, as well as brown ink refills. And maybe some Earl Grey tea will do the trick as well.



Brent

Norm Deplume asked:


With the overall economy in a serious slump, the upcoming new year provides a great reason to turn your own personal finances around.

Try out these ten simple tips and turn over a new financial leaf:

1. Deal with your debt, especially credit cards. You can easily save $700 by transferring a card with an 18% interest rate and $2,000 balance to a new card with a lower 8.25% rate. Even better, apply for a new card with a 0% balance transfer offer, and save even more.

2. Stick to a budget for just one week. It takes serious willpower to stick with a budget, but you could probably manage it for a week, right ? If you track your spending for just that week, you’ll gain some insight into where your money went. You may also find an obvious item to cut back on. As an example, you might decide that your daily mocha-latte isn’t worth the $20 you spend each week.

3. Pay a bit extra on your mortgage and save tens of thousands later. Paying just a hundred dollars additionally a month on a $200,000 mortgage will save you over $60,000 over the 30 year life of the loan, and you’ll pay off the loan five years earlier!

4. Use your company’s flexible health-care spending plan. Just put a set amount into the plan each month, then you can pay for items like copayments, chiropractors, prescriptions, common over-the-counter drugs, air purifiers, and more. And, those payments are made with your PRE-TAX salary, which saves you 10-30% or more.

5. Clip those coupons! Takes a bit of work on your part…but it’s not as time consuming as you think. Plus, you will save hundreds. Coupon fanatics save over 50%, and sometime 80% on their grocery bills. With much less effort, you can easily save at least 20%. Since the average cost per week of food for a family of four is $225 (source USDA), you can net back over $20 a week.

6. Do those little projects that save energy around your house. You Replace the weatherstripping on your windows and doors, put more insulation in the attic, brush out the fins on your air conditioner’s outdoor unit, or just switch out your light bulbs for CFL’s. Compact Fluorescent bulbs save around $9 each per year, and last 7 years. That’s $63 saved with one minute of effort!

7. Don’t eat out as much. Sure, it’s convenient, but it’s very costly. Eat out just one time per week and use some of the savings to prepare something special at home. You can have a great steak every week and still save money.

8. Save money on your 2008 tax bill. Consider a little professional help this year…it’s worth it. If you can’t afford the help, at least try one of the major software packages. They all have a module that will help you find deductions and credits that you are due. And…don’t wait until April…if you do it now, you’ll have your refund sooner.

9. Take a close look at your insurance policies. The new year is an ideal time to look at your auto, home and life insurance, and consider some money-saving changes. Perhaps you have too much coverage, or could benefit from a higher deductible. Or, you could look at combining your auto and home insurance under one company for the additional discount.

10. Stop Smoking. At $4-5 a pack, a one pack per day smoker can save around $1500 a year. That’s not even considering the discounts on life insurance, and your health and well-being. If your aren’t ready for that big of a step, consider switching to a generic brand, and save $350 in 2009. Or…just cut back to half a pack and save $750.



Raymond

Faith Anne asked:


Every morning when I make my tea, I pour a small amount in a bowl for Carrie (my cat) . Since it’s 1/2 milk & 1/2 Tea, she loves it. If I do not give her some, she drives me nuts trying to drink from my cup. Am I doing any harm to her? Note she has been doing this for 1 1/2 yrs. Thanks for any advice.

Georgia

restilimly asked:


I always find myself falling asleep in class and i came up with this idea that i would drink coffee before going to class so i can focus more. But i dont want caffeine because i’m still young etc.
so when i drink decaf coffee will that help me not to fall asleep in class? does decaf mean no caffeine at all or only reduced caffeine? And does decaf have negative effects? like diet cokes cause cancer, in excessive amounts though.

David

Rosanna Yee asked:


For all of us coffee lovers and addicts out there, Chase has introduced the Starbucks Duetto Platinum Credit Card. It acts as both a reloadable Starbucks card AND a reward-earning credit card! So you can quench your caffeine thirst and save money.

After merging with Bank One (previously Chicago’s largest bank), Chase Bank of Manhattan is now by far the largest bank in America… some claim that it may even be the biggest financial institution in the world! Chase not only offers various credit cards, they also offer services such as personal accounts, insurance and lending. With such a huge company unveiling the Starbucks Duetto card, we know that it is not only legit, but that it also will have great rates!

Upon activation, enjoy a 0% introductory APR (annual percentage rate) for up to 6 billing cycles, no annual fee, and a wide range of other VISA benefits. After that, there will be an automatic $5 donation made to the Starbucks Foundation when you make your first purchase on your new credit card and you also receive $10 free Duetto dollars! There’s more! With each purchase you make after that, you can earn a full 1% back towards your Starbucks Duetto Dollars. When you subscribe to the automatic reload program, you get a 3% cash rebate.

Once you’re signed up, you’re eligible for even more Starbucks perks. Earn points towards a pound of coffee, receive updates on Starbucks news, and experience the convenience of two cards in one in the Starbucks Platinum Duetto VISA card! Plus your local Starbucks barista is bound to give you even better service once they see which credit card you choose to carry in your wallet. They will see that you are committed to supporting your favorite coffee shop.

Before you purchase your next Starbucks coffee, apply for the Starbucks Duetto Platinum Credit Card. Then every time you use your credit card, you’ll be saving money on your coffee purchases. Even if you only use this credit card as a reloadable Starbucks card, it is worth it to support the Starbucks foundation. Start saving money today.



Benjamin

misTea asked:


I have heard conflicting things.
um this pertains to the QUALITY of the coffee not the QUANTITY. DUH double DUH.

Jason

peterhutch asked:


 

Irritable bowel syndrome is a disorder characterized most commonly by cramping, abdominal pain, bloating, constipation, and diarrhea. IBS causes a great deal of discomfort and distress, but it does not permanently harm the intestines and does not lead to a serious disease, as cancer. Most people can control their symptoms with diet, stress management, and prescribed medications.

Causes of Irritable Bowl Syndrome

Doctors are not sure what causes IBS. The nerves and muscles in the bowel appear to be extra sensitive in people with IBS. Muscles may contract too much when you eat.

Firstly, undigested sorbitol in the small intestine acts as a substrate (platform) for the fermentation of bacteria. Hydrogen gas is produced causing abdominal cramps, bloating and severe flatulence.

Symptoms Of irritable Bowl Syndrome

Abdominal pain or cramping.

Diarrhea or constipation — sometimes alternating bouts of constipation and diarrhea.

Often, eating a proper diet lessens Irritable Bowel Syndrome symptoms. However, before changing your diet, it is a good idea to keep a journal noting which foods seem to cause distress. Discuss your findings with your doctor and your doctor can help you make the proper diet changes.

When women without irritable bowel syndrome were about to be given the pain stimuli after a warning, their M.R.I. showed their brains stepping down the brain

Prevention

Abdominal pain is treated with smooth muscle relaxants such as nitroglycerine, hyoscyamine and met scopolamine.

Diarrhea is treated with Loperamide (Imodium) and diarrhea with abdominal discomfort is treated with Alosetron or Lotronex.

Treatments Of bowl Syndrome

Treatment through Diet

There are very clear dietary guidelines to follow for how to eat safely for Irritable Bowel Syndrome, based on the well-established effects certain

Categories of foods have on the GI tract. The key word here is categories. Any food that is high in fat, insoluble fiber, caffeine, coffee (even decaf), carbonation, or alcohol is problematic.

Through Hypnotherapy

With a success-rate of about 70% Professor Whorwell believes that, although labour-intensive, hypnotherapy could be an extremely effective treatment for the condition; and a less expensive alternative to new, costly drugs coming onto the market.

Antidepressants: Medications in this class can be taken over a longer period of time and may be chosen for their pain-reducing capability or to treat a co-existing depression or anxiety disorder.

Diagnosis

Mayo offers the latest in screening and diagnostic services for IBS. Diagnostic tools include stool studies, colonoscopies and functional assessment of the gastrointestinal tract. Physicians work together to rule out diseases such as inflammatory bowel disease, celiac disease or microscopic colitis that can be misdiagnosed as IBS. Determining the correct diagnosis is essential for effective treatment. Read more about IBS diagnosis.

There is no particular diagnostic test for IBS. The condition is diagnosed based on its symptoms and by ruling out other diseases. Typically your doctor will begin by asking about your medical history and your current symptoms. In addition, he or she will perform a physical evaluation. Diagnostic tests may be used to rule out other disorders. These can include stool or blood tests, X-rays, endoscopy and colonoscopy.

Self Care Of Bowl Syndrome

“Self-Care” is individuals making their own decisions regarding diagnosis and treatment of health problems, as well as preventive care. These days we know how important “choices” are in health care — the right doctor, the right insurance plan, the right price. But for simple ailments, millions of Americans are choosing themselves as their own providers of health care.

Prolapsed hemorrhoids are internal veins that stretch or collapse, and protrude to the outside of the ****.

Risk Factors of Bowl Syndrome

People who have a history of physical or sexual abuse or other psychological trauma. Several studies have found a link between a past history of abuse and gastrointestinal disorders.



Walter

Rachel S asked:


I’m in a wedding and the colors are latte and champagne. The bridesmaid dresses are latte and I need to know what color shoes would look best. The bride-to-be suggested black, white or dyeables, but I’m actually not liking any of those options. She said we could wear anything we wanted, those were just her suggestions

Hector