After a bad night’s sleep the tendency is to drink coffee in the morning to help you wake up. The same happens the next night, and the next and the next. However, the stimulating effects of coffee seem to stop working after the third bad night of lost sleep.
Scientists have discovered that caffeine loses its power to give us that necessary jolt if we sleep for less than five hours a night on three consecutive nights. In other words, don’t even consider drinking coffee after the third night of poor sleep; it won’t help you.
Coffee ‘significantly improves’ our performance levels if we haven’t slept well for two nights in a row, say scientists at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. However, the benefits of consuming two 200mg shots of caffeine a day will not have any effect on the third day.
They confirmed that caffeine’s diminishing returns when they tested it on a group of 48 volunteers, whose sleep was restricted to just five hours each night for five consecutive nights. They were given either two shots of caffeine or a placebo, and their performance was then measured afterwards.
In other health news about coffee, it has been downgraded as a cancer risk. Scientists now say they just don’t know if it causes cancer or not. Coffee has been listed as a possible carcinogen (cancer-causing agent) since 1991 and was thought to cause bladder cancer. However, now the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) says the evidence isn’t there.
Interestingly, drinking very hot drinks at temperatures above 65 degrees Celsius could lead to oesophageal (gullet) cancer. The new warning is based on studies from Iran, China and South America, where they drink very hot drinks. Just letting your hot drink cool for few minutes will be enough to make it much safer to drink.
Listening to classical music isn’t just relaxing; it physically changes levels of fats, such as the cholesterol, in your blood
While the IARC’s latest findings are welcome news for coffee lovers, the bare fact that any food or beverage is deemed possibly carcinogenic doesn’t tell us a great deal – whereas the amount you consume does. Also, coffee seems to have protective effects when it comes to other cancers; regular coffee drinkers have fewer cancers of the liver and womb. The best advice is to take coffee in moderation and certainly not after mid-afternoon if you find that it affects your sleeping pattern.
Listening to classical music isn’t just relaxing; it physically changes levels of fats, such as the cholesterol, in your blood. The music also lowers the heart rate and is an effective treatment for high blood pressure, a new study has found.
The bad news is that listening to pop music didn’t have the same beneficial effects. Those happened only when the participants listened to the music of Mozart and Strauss – the ‘waltz king’ in particular – for 25 minutes.
Researchers at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany tested the effects of classical music against pop music, or silence, in 120 participants. Half of them listened to music (with half of those listening to either classical music or ABBA as pop music), while the others spent 25 minutes lying down in silence.
Blood pressure, heart rate and blood fats were all measured before and after the sessions. Although the ‘silent’ group had lower blood fat levels afterwards, the drop was much more significant in those listening to classical music.
Interestingly, men were more affected than women, in terms of stress, as evidenced by their larger drops in cortisol (the stress hormone) with classical music (Dtsch. Arzteblint, 2016)
Migraine is always a multifactorial issue, and many times we just cannot pin down the cause. Vitamin supplements may be an effective treatment for migraine, as researchers have found that the vast majority of sufferers are deficient in vitamin D, riboflavin (vitamin B2) and coenzyme Q10.
A ‘high percentage’ of children and young adults are deficient in vitamins, especially the ones proven to be associated with migraine. Researchers at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, US, discovered this high prevalence of vitamin deficiency when they analysed blood samples from a large number of young migraine sufferers.
In particular, they tested for vitamin D, riboflavin, CoQ10 and B12 (folate). Most had a mild deficiency and were put on medication and vitamin supplements. However, because they weren’t given just the supplements, the researchers can’t be sure if they did the trick.
The deficiencies seem to differ according to the gender and age of the sufferers; girls and young women are more likely to have a CoQ10 deficiency, while more boys and young men are low in vitamin D, often called the sunshine vitamin, after its main source. Chronic migraine sufferers were also more often deficient in CoQ10 and riboflavin.
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