Your morning cup of coffee may start to taste even better after a major government study found that frequent coffee drinkers have a lower risk of dying from a variety of diseases, compared with people who drink little or no coffee.

The report, published online in The New England Journal of Medicine on Wednesday, analyzed the coffee-drinking habits of more than 400,000 men and women ages 50 to 71, making it the largest-ever study of the relationship between coffee consumption and health.

Previous studies have offered conflicting results on the relative benefits or harms associated with regular coffee consumption. While coffee contains caffeine, a stimulant that may temporarily increase heart rate and blood pressure in some people, coffee also contains hundreds of unique compounds and antioxidants that may confer health benefits. Further confusing much of the research into coffee is the fact that many coffee drinkers are also smokers, and it has been difficult to untangle the relative health effects of coffee and cigarettes.

To learn more, researchers from the National Institutes of Health analyzed diet and health information collected from questionnaires filled out by 229,119 men and 173,141 women who were members of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) between 1995 and 1996. The respondents were followed until 2008, by which point 52,000 had died.

As expected, the researchers found that the regular coffee drinkers in the group were also more likely to be smokers. They ate more red meat and fewer fruits and vegetables, exercised less and drank more alcohol – all behaviors associated with poor health.

But once the researchers controlled for those risks, the data showed that the more coffee a person consumed, the less likely he or she was to die from a number of health problems, including diabetes, heart disease, respiratory disease, stroke, infections and even injuries and accidents.

Over all, the risk of dying during the 14-year study period was about 10 percent lower for men and about 15 percent lower for women who drank anywhere from two cups to six or more cups of coffee a day. The association between coffee and lower risk of dying was similar whether the coffee drinker consumed caffeinated or decaffeinated coffee.

Neal D. Freedman, the study’s lead author and an investigator for the National Cancer Institute, cautioned that the findings, based on observational data, show only an association between coffee consumption and lower risk for disease, so it isn’t known whether drinking more coffee will lead to better health. As a result, Dr. Freedman said that people should be conservative in interpreting the data, but that regular coffee drinkers can be reassured.

“It’s a modest effect,” he said. “But the biggest concern for a long time has been that drinking coffee is a risky thing to do. Our results, and some of those of more recent studies, provide reassurance for coffee drinkers that this isn’t the case. The people who are regularly drinking coffee have a similar risk of death as nondrinkers, and there might be a modest benefit.’’

The researchers also looked at death rates from cancer during the study period and found no link between coffee consumption and cancer risk among women. There was a slightly higher risk of cancer death among men who drank several cups of coffee a day, but Dr. Freedman said the effect was small and may be due to chance. Additional research will analyze associations between coffee drinking and various types of cancer.

Dr. Freedman said the next step is to learn more about the various compounds in coffee and how they may be related to improved health.

“It’s estimated there are 1,000 or more compounds in coffee,’’ said Dr. Freedman. “All of these could affect health in different ways. It might be due to one of the many compounds in coffee, or a number of them working together.”

When taken as a supplement, unroasted — or green — coffee-bean extract can help people shed pounds, according to a small preliminary study.

The research, which is being presented this week at the national meeting of the American Chemical Society in San Diego, involved just 16 overweight and obese patients who were given daily doses of green coffee extract in capsule form.

All the patients were instructed to maintain their usual dietary habits, while the study team monitored them for weight loss over a period of nearly six months.

The apparent result: Daily consumption of a small amount of green coffee extract translated into a nearly 11 percent drop in body weight, on average.

The study was conducted in India and funded by Applied Food Sciences, the American manufacturer of two green-coffee-extract products. It has not been published in a journal, and therefore has yet to undergo peer review.

Supplements of this kind, however, are not subject to the rigorous U.S. Food and Drug Administration safety and efficacy testing typically applied to all pharmaceutical medications.

“This was indeed a small study,” acknowledged corresponding study author Joe Vinson, a professor of chemistry at the University of Scranton, in Pennsylvania, but he noted that prior research has been conducted in both France and Japan. “Those studies demonstrated that patients experienced somewhat mild weight loss. But here, with higher extract doses than have been used before, the patients experienced what I would call rather large weight loss.”

“While this of course needs to be confirmed with follow-up, I do think the subject is absolutely worthy of further exploration,” Vinson added.

Vinson said his team was not focused on the weight-loss impact of caffeine as much as that of unprocessed, unroasted coffee’s primary ingredient: chlorogenic acid.

“That’s the main natural compound in unroasted coffee, and roasted coffee has much, much less of it than unprocessed coffee,” Vinson said. “So we’re not talking about something that is interchangeable with the coffee we drink,” which is produced by roasting beans at a temperature between 464 and 482 degrees Fahrenheit.

Green coffee-bean extracts are sold online at prices ranging from about $10 to $20 for 60 capsules.

The study was broken into three six-week sections. In one section, study participants, who were all between the ages of 22 and 26, consumed a capsule filled with 700 milligrams of green coffee extract. In the second section, participants took a 1,050-milligram capsule. The third section had participants taking a placebo. Each patient ultimately cycled through each section.

While maintaining their pre-study dietary and exercise regimens, the patients lost an average of 17 pounds by the study’s close. On average, patients lost 10.5 percent and 16 percent of their body weight and body fat, respectively.

“Basically, there was steady weight loss, without side effects, while the active green coffee extract was being taken at either dose,” Vinson said.

A follow-up study involving 60 patients is now in the planning stages.

Lona Sandon, a registered dietitian and assistant professor of clinical nutrition at the University of Texas Southwestern in Dallas, cautioned that the study is short on specifics, making it difficult to draw any conclusions.

“First of all, you need more than 16 people to have any statistical significance attached to these findings,” Sandon said. “And we really have no idea how this might be working. For example, the patients were allowed to continue with their regular diet. But did this extract in any way influence their hunger and what they wanted to eat, and then what they actually ate? We don’t know. What we have here is basically just a hypothesis that there’s something about this compound that could be helpful.”

“Just because it might cause weight loss doesn’t mean it’s healthy,” she warned. “Because supplements are not regulated as drugs, they can be put on the market with no safety or efficacy testing. They don’t even necessarily have to be tested for purity.”

“That means that in the past, various weight-loss supplements have been found to contain weight-loss drugs or other drugs at higher doses than what would be allowed in a prescription dose,” Sandon added. “So while people might have this perception that it’s all natural since it’s coming from a coffee bean, with supplements in general it’s still a buyer-beware market.”

Yesterday morning, gadget and gizmo sites around the net were buzzing about this little machine — the Top coffee brewer from Scanomat. The machine is designed withoffice and commercial environments in mind, can be controlled by an iPhone or pad and puts all the actual machinery out of site, tucked neatly away in an optional cabinet. The only visible part of the coffee machine — which does espresso, brewed coffee, hot water and has an integrated frother — is the gooseneck dispenser pipe that rises gracefully above the cabinet top.

Gizmodo headlined it as a “Minimalist coffee maker” — but really, how minimalist can something be when you need a whole cabinet just to hide the bulk of its components? Now, I’m not talking the Scanomat down here. Honestly, my first reaction was “Oooh, pretty!” But the only thing minimalist about this whole setup is the design aesthetic it’s meant to suit.

It got me thinking about real minimalist coffee solutions — ways of making coffee that don’t require specialized gear, the kind of thing my daughter refers to as “ghetto gourmet”. I’m a long-time collector of low-tech coffee-making methods that produce quite decent coffee. Some of them are just the way that people like to make their coffee. Others demonstrate the lengths to which people will go to get their brew fix even under difficult circumstances.

A couple of weeks back, Cory Doctorow, who blogs over at BoingBoing, wrote about the plastic baggie cold brew method he uses on the road. Essentially, he adds ground coffee to water in a zip-close plastic storage bag and puts it in the mini-bar refrigerator  before he goes to bed at night. In the morning, he strains it through a fine mesh strainer fitted into his Aeropress tube and drinks it cold. Personally, I think the fine mesh strainer and Aeropress is a bit more gear than you actually need for cold brew but I give him kudos for getting drinkable coffee under difficult circumstances.

We had to deal with a bit of that ourselves last summer when a tropical storm left us without electricity for nearly a week. We turned the refrigerator into an icebox by packing the bottom shelf with purchased ice blocks and I did cold-brew coffee by the half-gallon — literally. Each night, stirred a cup of finely ground Spanish coffee into 2 quarts of cold water in a plastic pitcher, covered it and put it in the icebox overnight. In the morning, I strained the coffee through a double thickness of cheesecloth into a second 2-quart pitcher, covered it and put it back in the fridge. It was concentrated and rich, excellent cold and decent heated up in a saucepan on the stove. The only one who had problems with it was the roomie, who could never seem to remember that the pitcher with the blue cover was brewing, and the one with the green cover was brewed. He drank muddy grounds for two days before complaining about it. But then, this is a man who’ll reuse his K-cups — and I do mean reuse the used grounds — so  take from that what you will.

Over the years, I’ve seen people deal with the conundrum of brewing coffee without their usual gear in all sorts of creative ways, including the woman who, when she ran out of filters, opened tea bags and refilled them with coffee. What’s the furthest you’ve ever gone to get your coffee fix when you couldn’t make coffee your usual way? 

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The coffee news analysts have been predicting for months that your cup of coffee is going up in price. Daily, reports come out about the crop here and there, whether it’s better or worse than previous years. Are the two types of reports related? Is the upward trend in coffee prices related to smaller crops and therefore a boost in price? After all, one condition that’s NOT in dispute is the growth in demand, with China’s sudden coffee craving being the biggest source of this growth.

If supply is indeed down and demand is indeed up, then it’s a no-brainer that price will increase. Except there’s one small detail, a detail involving a difference in opinion between the buyers, the suppliers, the speculators and the producers. Each places the blame for the increase on the other. So what’s the truth?

The fact that the retail price of coffee has increased isn’t in dispute. The Bureau of Labor Statistics in fact found that in July, coffee was up 20.7 percent over July of a year ago. If you talk to a spokesperson for the International Coffee Organization, they’ll tell you that global production of bags was up 8.1 % over a year ago. They’ll also tell you that demand grew at a faster rate, so producers are just not keeping up. On the other hand, ask a supplier, and he probably will tell you that the demand and supply tension has been going back and forth, so there’s more to it than that. He might add that the speculators used that pattern as a reason to predict future prices will be higher.

The brew thickens, as buyer Howard Schultz, no slouch in the coffee business, stated he had no trouble buying beans in March, concluding there was no such shortage in supply. A Dunkin Donuts buyer, another top retailer, echoed Schultz. They both felt speculators caused the price increases, not supply vs demand. Indeed, even a commissioner on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) commented, “Speculators have influenced coffee prices in commodity markets in a way that isn’t consistent with the fundamentals of supply and demand.”

So who IS to blame? Is it the supplier, who’s not supplying all that’s produced; or the producer, who is not keeping up with demand; or the speculator, who’s betting that demand will be so much higher than supply that prices will increase radically? Yes, it can be documented that demand seemed to rise faster than supply, but then, two top buyers – Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts – experienced no shortage of supply this spring. Maybe the top suppliers were able to buy their beans, but smaller buyers were not?

Regardless, it’s not crystal clear just what is driving up the prices for future coffee on the market. If new production comes online with bumper crops, and demand levels off, the speculators may lose and the consumer win. Only time will tell. In the meantime, brew carefully to get the most brew from the beans.

A frost that reached some coffee- growing regions in top producerBrazil last week may cut output by almost 1 million bags next season, according to Archer Consulting.

Temperatures fell below 2 degrees Celsius (35.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in some growing areas in southern Minas Gerais state, Sao Paulo and northern Parana, with possible frost formation, Marco Antonio dos Santos, an agronomist at Somar Meteorologia, said by phone on Aug 5.

“Some market participants are currently calculating a loss slightly smaller than 1 million bags for next season,” Rodrigo Costa, a contributor to Sao Paulo-based Archer, said in a weekly report e-mailed today. There was still no consensus on how much production would be lost, he said.

Lower temperatures caused “some damage” to coffee crops, with higher intensity in the growing region of Pocos de Caldas in southern Minas Gerais, Santos-based broker Escritorio Carvalhaes wrote in a report dated Aug. 5. Minas Gerais is Brazil’s largest arabica coffee-producing state.

The lack of agreement on losses from next year’s crop may support prices along with depleted stockpiles and tight supplies, Costa said.

Detective Joseph Hileman and Lieutenant Terry Choate don’t typically order their coffee with cream, sugar, and two shots of snot.

So you can imagine how surprised the two Jaffrey, N.H., police officers were when they witnessed former Dunkin’ Donuts employee Christopher Hildreth allegedly add his personal blend of “nasal mucus” to their coffee order.

According to a Jaffrey Police Department affidavitacquired by The Smoking Gun, the 20-year-old server took the coffee cups into the back room after taking the order on June 19. The officers said that they found this “odd as they had never seen him go to the back of the store to make coffee in the past.”

Of course, you should never tamper with a cop’s cup of joe, so it didn’t take much expert detective work to catch Hildreth sticking his nose where it didn’t belong. A monitor located in the front of the Dunkin’ Donuts location shows everything that is happening in the back room, so the officers simply had to look up to see Hildreth seemingly dropping “nasal mucus into their coffees,” according to the report.

The officers later returned the coffees and sat down with store manager Joanne Amato to review the surveillance tapes, which revealed “it was even more obvious that [Hileman] had placed nasal mucus into their coffees.”

Hildreth was promptly fired.

He has since been charged with two misdemeanor counts of attempted assault. His arraignment is slotted for Sept. 15 in district court.

Evidence that coffee and tea may be good for your health has been mounting in recent years, as it’s become apparent that the tasty brews may help protect against type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease, cardiovascular disease and other ills.

NEW YORK (MainStreet) — In an effort to cut costs in the face of a tough economy, consumers are trying everything from purchasing fewer name brand medicines to cutting back on their morning coffee, one new survey shows.

Two-thirds of Americans confessed they purchased more generic drugs this year to pinch pennies, according to a survey of more than 2,000 adults conducted by Harris Interactive, up from 62% who said they did so in an identical survey from June 2009. Likewise, 43% said they had opted to visit their hairstylist or barber less often during that time, compared to about a third who admitted doing that two years ago.

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