Coffee drinkers - relax! Modern science has confirmed that what you are drinking is far more than just great-tasting enjoyment. Highly potent forces are at work in that steaming cup of coffee, ones that not only make us more alert, but that also have an amazing and positive effect on our health and sense of wellbeing.
We all know the stories about coffee: you can get hooked on it; it triggers palpitations, damages the heart and circulation and causes high blood pressure; it makes you less fertile and, as if that wasn't enough, it robs the body of vital vitamins and minerals.
None of this is new, of course. For centuries, scholars have raged against coffee. Some seventeenth century savants believed that coffee propelled people into a state of melancholia. The enjoyment of coffee was blamed for unexplained haemorrhages and anxiety attacks. We now know that none of this has any basis in fact.
Other commentators of the time, by contrast, considered coffee to be a sure way of curing headaches or alleviating stomach problems. Whether taken for vertigo or indigestion, kidney stones, gallstones or rheumatism, coffee, for many, was a panacea used to try and cure all kinds of ailments. Indeed, to start with, it was to be found only at the apothecary's as a popular cure-all. Coffee was being credited with having medicinal properties right up to the last century: in the 1950s, for instance, it was thought that applying strongly roasted coffee beans in powder form to bald patches could reactivate hair growth.
An advertisement in a London newspaper of 1675 claimed that coffee was an exceedingly healthy and invigorating beverage that "aids the digestion, quickens the mind, lightens the heart and helps prevent soreness of the eyes, coughing, chills, colds, consumption, headaches, dropsy, gout and scurvy".
Many of the traditionally held negative beliefs and criticisms are now held by science to be completely without foundation. Experts the world-over are now able to use the latest analytical methods to examine exactly what coffee contains. The observable health effects can now be monitored far more precisely and effectively than was the case decades ago.
Wide-scale research, for instance, has shown that coffee does not damage the heart in any way, but actually helps it work better - on condition, naturally, that you drink good quality coffee that is free of chemicals. Coffee has a demonstrably positive impact on the central nervous system, and therefore on brain activity. Coffee does not, as once thought, make people melancholic; quite the opposite, in fact - coffee lifts the mood.
The same goes for the frequently expressed fears of recent decades that coffee could cause cancer: all the signs are that it does no such thing. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that the chlorogenic acid in coffee can actually protect you from cancer of the colon and of the liver.
Healthy people on balanced diets have no need to fear that coffee will deprive them of vitamins or prevent their bodies from assimilating enough minerals, say many doctors.
Because it's a stimulant, caffeine is to be found in some headache and migraine tablets and in many other medicines, such as those used to treat cardiac insufficiency, neuralgia, asthma attacks and allergies. There also exists an homeopathic remedy (Coffea Cruda) prepared from dried, raw coffee beans that helps relieve sleeplessness, nervous heart disorders, migraines and pathological urinary incontinence; there's another (Coffea Tosta), prepared from strongly roasted beans, that's used in the treatment of sleep disturbance and neuralgia.
Source: "Kaffee: Nicht die Bohne ungesund", by Anita Hessmann-Kosaris