Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

You can make coffee hot or cold, weak or strong, and even good or bad. But one thing you shouldn’t make coffee is scary. And what’s making coffee scary today — in a way that mysterious substances such as Jamba Juice‘s “immunity boost” only used to scare us — are con artists who now target [...]

Tags: antioxidants, coffee_health, coffee_marketing, espresso_review, healthy_coffee, soma

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This past week, most of the coffee discussion around the Internet involved the subject of caffeine. Talk about caffeine seems to bring out the worst in people. Too many act as if coffee and caffeine are synonymous and interchangeable — whether it’s scientific research on the effects of caffeine or some lame riff on coffee [...]

Tags: caffeine, caffeine_riff, coffee_health, decaf_coffee, media-medical-research-complex, medical_journalism

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Earlier this week, we caught a radio broadcast of NPR’s “Fresh Air” where the program’s host, Terri Gross, was interviewing an entomologist named Douglas Emlen: The Fascinating World Of The Dung Beetle : NPR. About 34-35 minutes into the audio program, Mr. Emlen introduces an anecdote about cockroaches and coffee that even manages to gross [...]

Tags: coffee_health, coffee_pods, coffee_quality, preground_coffee

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We’ve been harping on the ethically and intellectually bankrupt medical infotainment industry for years now. Publicity stunts masked as science are bad enough (see: Tuesday’s example). But bad science transformed into a publicity stunt is far more irresponsible. A textbook example came to us all this week in the form of a flawed study linking [...]

Tags: caffeine, coffee_health, medical_journalism, press_releases

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Two days ago, the New York Times ran another pop piece of medical journalism about coffee. However, this time they disguised it as a critique of medical journalism: Personal Health – Sorting Out Coffee’s Contradictions – NYTimes.com. Now we’ve managed to survive a six-month moratorium on pointless medical research articles about coffee — which is [...]

Tags: caffeine, coffee_health, media, media-medical-research-complex, medical_journalism

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We should all feel thankful that, once in a rare while, the confusing morass of pop medical journalism is broken by the occasional intelligent voice of informed reason. Last month, the media had a feeding frenzy over a lone medical study linking caffeine to increased risk of miscarriage: Pregnancy Problems Tied to Caffeine. Today’s New [...]

Tags: caffeine, coffee_health, high_fructose_corn_syrup, medical_journalism, obesity

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Many of you are probably more than already aware of this, but the latest trend in consumable marketing is something of an unholy marriage between food staples and over-the-counter pharmaceuticals. It’s not just juice smoothies that promote mysterious “immunity boosts” anymore. It’s also things like fortified coffee. And what’s with all this “energy boost” crap [...]

Tags: coffee_health, coffee_marketing, energy_drinks

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Being popular is hard. No, this isn’t the plot for the next Legally Blonde sequel; it’s the message our society sends when changes in popular consumer tastes inevitably raise questions of product safety. A decade ago, the advent of cellular phones inspired a wave of fear mongering when the Paranoid Whack Jobs (henceforth referenced as [...]

Tags: caffeine_addiction, coffee_health, paranoid_whack_jobs

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If you ever wondered the depths at which some people can profit from human stupidity, today’s San Francisco Chronicle underscored the point: What’s New: Fortified organic coffee. (Thanks, Cindy Lee, for spreading the unchecked stupidity.) Yes, that “healthy coffee” thing, where foolish lemmings leap off cliffs in blind faith and obedience over health claims made [...]

Tags: coffee_health, coffee_marketing, just_plain_stupid

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We are a nation of fabricated addictions. Not real addictions — to things like heroin, crack, or alcohol that require treatment programs, follow Addiction Severity Indexes, break families apart, and are highly correlated with crime and prison time. I’m talking about our inability to moderate personal consumption of relatively benign things. Things like caffeine, meat, [...]

Tags: caffeine, caffeine_addiction, coffee_health, giving_up_coffee

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