A cup of a day keeps experts arguing
JAKARTA (JP): Nothing goes down the throat with greater satisfaction than that early morning cup of aromatic coffee.
It was the Dutch East India Company that introduced the African bean to Java. And since the advent of 17th century, Java has remained a coffee plantation giant and a massive exporter of the beans.
Now health conscious people are looking at their cups of java with contempt.
The cholesterol maniacs all over the world first renounced bacon, then eggs, cream, buttered toast and doughnuts and now it's coffee under severe indictment for hiking your cholesterol level.
However don't retire your coffee mug just yet. Although one group of researchers implicates it as a potential suspect, another exonerates it.
In 1983 (as reported by Consumer Reports 1991) the Tromso Heart study of some 14,000 Norwegians found that cholesterol levels of heavy coffee drinkers, those that consume more than nine cups a day, were 14 percent higher then those who drank one cup a day.
In 1992 U.S. researchers in the multi center Hypertension and Follow up Program reported a similar trend in 9,000 Americans. However the cholesterol count was not so alarming. It was higher in the low coffee consumers by only three percent.
More good news for coffee lovers is a study conducted by the Framingham Heart University that evaluated more than 6,000 people over a period of 20 years. They declared no consistent association between the two Cs -- coffee and cholesterol.
However top Indonesian medical consultants advise drinking less coffee or using drip filtered only. Dr. Sawhney, a practitioner in Cleveland who visited Jakarta in June strongly recommends in all his seminars and workshops, "You know you have to start being careful, if you drink more than five cups of coffee in a day or if you have other risk factors for coronary disease, such as diabetes, high blood pressure, smoking or a family history of heart attack before the age of 55."
So feeling perfectly safe with my once-a-day cuppa, I plan to relish it with a vengeance. Every morning when my face is given a natural steaming as I sip from that piping hot mug as it tantalizes my nostrils, I do not think about the cardiovascular or high cholesterol demons that might have potential associations with coffee consumers. Some things in life are just too good to worry about.
-Pavan Kapoor