Kate Heyhoe | Caffeine and You

Hit-and-Run Driver Pleads “Starbucks Defense”

June 4, 2013 By Kate Heyhoe

Caffeine and bipolar disorder caused Daniel Noble’s reckless driving spree.

True story: Excessive caffeine, a mental disorder, and no sleep lead to tragic consequences…

At 7:30 on the morning of December 8, 2009, Daniel Noble drove his gold Pontiac onto the University of Washington campus and without hesitation, plowed down a student in a crosswalk. One block later, Noble drove up onto the sidewalk and struck another young man. Again, Noble didn’t stop. He drove ahead and parked on the same road in the middle of campus, less than 200 yards from his second victim. Both men’s legs were broken. Noble had knocked them right out their shoes. One shoe was later found high in a tree.

Noble, wearing pajamas and slippers, stepped out of his car and began walking to a nearby building. The car was as shattered as his victims. The windshield had imploded, bearing a gaping hole and crackled veins on every surface. A dent the size of a person marred the roof. Hair and a small piece of scalp peeked out from the weather stripping on the driver’s side door. Officers later said it was a miracle no one else had been hurt.

Normal Guy Snaps

Noble stood 6’1″, and weighed 300 pounds. His dark brown hair, fashionably cropped in the upright, spiky style of the times, stood out in all directions. As officers approached him, they could hear Noble swearing and rambling incoherently. When they tried to arrest him, he became argumentative. A struggle ensued. One officer wrestled Noble to the ground. Noble fought back so fiercely, they had to taser him into submission.

Everyone, from his wife to his colleagues, was stunned by Noble’s behavior. He was a financial analyst for the University of Idaho Foundation and bore no history of mental instability or criminal behavior. He often started his day at 4:00 AM. He was a hard working, regular guy.

What could possibly cause Noble to go bonkers?

Was It the Caffeine or the Combination?

Caffeine was at the heart of the defense team’s reasoning. To great public surprise, they won the case. But caffeine alone wasn’t the whole story.

A number of witnesses had testified on Noble’s behalf. The barista at the local Starbucks said Noble was a normal, regular customer. But he’d shown up that fateful, near-freezing morning in pajamas, with no cell phone, and ordered two large coffees. Noble’s wife said he started to act peculiar two or three days before. He gradually got worse. He’d been working long hours in recent weeks to finish up the foundation’s budget, and wasn’t sleeping well at night. He drank coffee and energy drinks to keep going.

Medical experts diagnosed Noble as suffering from a rare form of bipolar disorder – triggered by heavy consumption of caffeine. In other words, Noble had suffered temporary insanity caused by caffeine psychosis. That diagnosis was key to Noble’s defense.

The judge dismissed the charges after concluding Noble was unable to form the mental intent to commit a crime. Noble was released but ordered to receive mental treatment, and not to drive or consume caffeine.

Victim Faces Long Recovery

Meanwhile, the injured students recovered, despite painful and long-lasting injuries.

The 19-year old freshman, Neil Waldbjorn, was hit especially hard. The accident “broke two bones in his right leg, two bones in his left arm, ripped muscles and tendons off the bone in his left leg, and damaged his lungs and spleen so badly that he spent six days in an intensive-care unit,” reported wenatcheeworld.com. Months later, he was still in physical therapy.

Hogun Hahm also suffered a broken leg, and soon after returned to his home in South Korea.

No doubt either victim felt Noble’s caffeine consumption was a justifiable defense, but even a normally benign drug like caffeine can have serious consequences, especially when mental stability is already compromised.

A Caffeine Buzz Gets Out of Control

Some would argue against the merits of Daniel Noble’s legal defense, but the case raises an important question about the world’s most widely consumed drug: Under what conditions can caffeine become a dangerous substance?

In Noble’s case, faulty neural wiring (bipolar disorder) in combination with the overuse of caffeine flipped his mental state upside down. He lost control, and didn’t even remember what he had done.

Caffeine is complex, and not everyone responds the same way, as this true story shows. Caffeine has many benefits when taken in low to moderate doses. But it’s still a potent drug and impacts the central nervous system, including the brain.

To find out how caffeine works, jump over to Caffeine Basics, my online book – it’s free and uploaded chapter-by-chapter at CaffeineAndYou.com.

[NOTE: Chapter 8 – Habit, Safety and Addiction is being updated with new information from the American Psychiatric Association’s just released Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). I’ll upload that chapter soon, as it relates directly to this Starbuck’s Defense post.]

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So, what do you think? Was Noble’s sentence just, did the judge rule fairly? Was caffeine at the heart of his condition, or was this an excuse? Leave a comment and chime in.

Cheating Death: Do Coffee Drinkers Live Longer?

May 31, 2013 By Kate Heyhoe

Does coffee drinking cheat death?

Death is inevitable, but a major study shows…

“Coffee drinkers have a lower risk of death.”

I read this twice and still wondered: What exactly does this mean?

“Older adults who drank coffee, both caffeinated or decaffeinated, had a lower risk of death overall than people who did not drink coffee,” says a study sponsored by the National Cancer Institute (NCI, a division of the National Institutes of Health) and AARP.

Coffee drinkers aren’t immortal – and they didn’t necessarily live longer – but they were less likely to die from such common killers as heart disease, respiratory disease, stroke, injuries and accidents, diabetes, and infections. (The association was not seen for cancer, at least in this study, but other research shows coffee reduces the risk of certain cancers.)

Bottom line: coffee is safe to drink – that’s the biggest takeaway from this study. And coffee may even benefit your health. You’ll still die, but maybe not as soon.

A Relief for Billions Worldwide

Americans alone consume 400 million cups of coffee per day, so coffee’s health effects are a big deal.

For decades, coffee’s safety has been questioned. Early studies didn’t weed out smokers, who tend to live life on the edge by eating more red meat and few fruits and vegetables, drinking alcohol, and avoiding exercise. Smokers also tend to drink a lot of coffee. (Previous coffee research is also complicated by conflicting results, which may be due to poor methodology, small samples, conflating caffeine and coffee, or for other reasons.)

But unlike early research, the NCI/AARP study is the largest and longest running of its kind. It analyzed coffee-drinking habits of 400,000 men and women aged 50 to 71 – and it controlled for people with poor health habits, known chronic diseases (like cancer), and other data-skewing factors.

The study analyzed the habits of 229,119 men and 173,141 women over 14 years. Respondents completed questionnaires about their diet and health information in 1995 and 1996, and were tracked through 2008; by the end of the study, 52,000 had died.

The Bottom Line

Generally speaking, here’s what the data showed:

• The more coffee consumed, the less likely a person was to die from various common health problems, including diabetes, heart disease, respiratory disease, stroke, infections, and even injuries and accidents.

• The risk of dying during the 14-year period was 10 percent lower for men and 15 percent lower for women who drank from two to six or more cups of coffee per day, regardless of whether the coffee was caffeinated or decaffeinated coffee.

• Regular, long-term coffee consumption is associated, then, with a lower risk for certain life-threatening diseases. This study doesn’t support cause and effect: it doesn’t show that drinking coffee itself creates better health or longer life. We can’t be sure why the coffee-drinkers had less disease, only that a significant percentage of them did – and that 5-cup a day drinkers had less incidence of disease than the 2-cup a day group.

Coffee has more than a thousand compounds, including caffeine, which has been well-researched but still confounds scientists. The next step, says Dr. Neal Freedman, the study’s lead author, is to explore these compounds to determine their health impact, both singly and in combination.

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The results of the study were published in the May 17, 2012, edition of the New England Journal of Medicine. You can read the actual study here:

Association of Coffee Drinking with Total and Cause-Specific Mortality

Modern Rush: Ready-to-Drink Tea

May 27, 2013 By Kate Heyhoe

Ready-to-Drink Tea: A $3.5 billion market

Cold, Instant, and On-the-Go: How We Like Our Tea

More Americans go inside convenience stores to buy caffeinated beverages than for any other reason.

The tripod of modern living stands on three legs: Convenience, time-saving, and mobility. Just look at digital devices, fast food, and caffeine. Seattle became famous for its drive-through coffee spots. Coffee is a cash cow for McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts. And now tea is beating out coffee and soda at some cash registers.

Caffeinated drinks – including coffee, iced tea, sodas and energy drinks – are what keep the local mini-mart in business, and what keeps their mobile customers on the go-go-go. Coffee’s hot all year, but in summer, iced tea sales soar.

Instant iced tea was the big 20th century boost for tea. It first entered the consumer market in 1953, and when Lipton Instant Iced Tea arrived in 1958, iced tea really took off.

When Snapple introduced bottled iced tea almost thirty years later, it created a whole new beverage category: Ready-to-Drink tea is now led by brands like AriZona, Fuze, Honest Tea, Sweet Leaf, and the giants Lipton and Nestea.

Bottom line: When tea became instant, sales took off. When it became cold, instant and ready-to-drink, tea joined the ranks of coffee and colas as a powerful caffeinated player – at least in the U.S. In Asia and other substantial portions of the globe, hot tea remains the main caffeinated beverage, but iced tea increasingly appeals to a young, cosmopolitan market.

U.S. Tea Sales Catching Up

Overall, tea is second only to water as the most widely consumed beverage worldwide, a fact often mentioned.

But did you know: More tea is consumed worldwide than coffee, chocolate, alcohol and soft drinks combined. After the American Revolution, tea’s popularity declined severely in the U.S. A hundred and fifty years later, specialty blends gave tea a big boost, especially Constant Comment in 1945 and more recent upscale brands like Republic of Tea and Tazo (now owned by Starbucks). Reports of the health benefits from tea’s antioxidants also kicked up consumption.

According to the Tea Association of the USA:

Approximately 85% of tea consumed in America is iced.
Over the last ten years, Ready-To-Drink Tea has grown by more than 17.5 times. In 2011, Ready-To-Drink sales were conservatively estimated at $3.50 billion
In 2011, over 65% of the tea brewed in the United States was prepared using tea bags. Ready-to-Drink and iced tea mix comprises about one fourth of all tea prepared in the U.S., with instant and loose tea accounting for the balance. Instant tea is declining and loose tea is gaining in popularity, especially in Specialty Tea and coffee outlets.
On any given day, about one half of the American population drinks tea. On a regional basis, the South and Northeast have the greatest concentration of tea drinkers.

As with coffee in the 20th century, the perception of “premium” quality gave tea traction. During the last fifty years, tea has been marketed as a special treat, bringing caffeine, pleasure, and reward to the tea-drinking brain.

So next time you pop into a mini-mart to pay for your gas, take a look at the 53 or so brands of tea in the cooler. Since ready-to-drink iced tea has brought a new level of passion to consumers, you’d be right to say it’s a really “hot” product.

Swirled Matcha-Chocolate Brownies

May 27, 2013 By Kate Heyhoe

An Easy Upgrade: Swirled Matcha-Chocolate Brownies

By Kate Heyhoe

When my chocolate Jones needs a fast fix – and a bigger rush than a chocolate bar can provide – this treat rescues me. It’s the reason why boxed brownie mixes were invented – they deliver a flavor flood that’s quick and also creative, because tinkering with mixes is so easy. (The Cake Mix Doctor’s made a career out of it.)

Matcha tea, that vivid green tea powder with seductive flavor, meets cream cheese in this swirly chocolate brownie. Any chocolate brownie mix works, though super fudgy brownies tend to overpower the matcha. But go with your heart and what’s in your pantry. (And yes, of course you can always make the brownie batter from scratch, instead of a mix.)

The process is simple: Whip up the matcha-cream cheese mixture from scratch, then do the cheat: swirl it on top of the brownie batter, and bake. It takes less than an hour from mix to mouth.

Swirl the matcha batter into the brownie batter

Instructions

Follow the package directions for the brownie mix, including the oven temperature and pan preparation (such as greasing the pan bottom or whatever it says), and baking time. After you’ve poured the batter into the pan, swirl the Matcha-Cream Cheese batter into the top, and bake.

Matcha-Cream Cheese Batter

8 ounces cream cheese, at room temperature
1 large egg
1/4 cup granulated sugar
1 tablespoon all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon matcha green tea powder
1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Dump all ingredients into a mixing bowl. With an electric mixture (stand or handheld), combine all ingredients. It’s okay if tiny bits of cream cheese remain unblended; I like seeing little white spots poke through the swirl after baking. Let cool. Cut, serve, and swoon.

Swirling tips: Drop clumps of matcha batter on top of brownie batter. Use a knife to draw through the matcha batter and create swirls. If you want green streaks inside the brownies, fold the matcha batter deeper into the brownie layer by rolling the knife down, through, and up.

Ginger Options: If you want to gild the lily, stir 2 tablespoons crystallized ginger into the matcha batter before spreading. You can also mix a teaspoon or so ground ginger into the brownie batter, for twice the ginger flavor.

Swirled Matcha-Brownies take minutes to mix, then bake

S’more Nachos

May 22, 2013 By Kate Heyhoe

S’more Nacho by Kate Heyhoe, from Macho Nachos

Got the munchies? S’more Macho Nachos are fast treats and don’t require an open flame.

From Macho Nachos (Kindle; Apple/iTunes) by Kate Heyhoe

As a Camp Fire Girl, I‘m not sure which part of s’mores I enjoyed more—the process of browning (or more often, blackening) the marshmallows on skewers over an open flame and then smooshing them between chocolate bars and graham crackers, or actually eating them.

S’mores remain a popular treat for kids and a nostalgic one for adults. Nouveau S’mores have been popping up in fine dining restaurants coast to coast. Some establishments actually let you toast your own marshmallows at table over small pots of red-hot coals. Even The French Laundry (which some consider America’s finest restaurant) serves s’mores, albeit with premium Valrhona chocolate, made-from-scratch marshmallows and homemade whole-wheat honey graham crackers.

Not to be outdone by s’more mania, the Macho Nachos version adopts the motto “the s’more the merrier.” Nutty peanut butter, thinned with a touch of maple syrup, “glues” tiny marshmallows and chocolate to a flour tortilla wedge, edged with a border of crunchy, buttery graham cracker crumbs. Just 3 minutes in a hot oven for golden, pillowy, marshmallow treats. One bite and off you go down memory lane—widened and repaved, but nonetheless, a merry pathway back to younger days. Makes one 8-inch flour tortilla; serves 3 to 6

Ingredients

2 tablespoons nutty peanut butter
2 teaspoons pure maple syrup
3 tablespoons graham cracker crumbs
1 teaspoon unsalted butter
1 8-inch flour tortilla
Nonstick spray
20 to 30 mini-marshmallows
2 tablespoons chocolate sprinkles or semisweet mini chocolate chips

1. Heat the oven to 475˚F. with an oven rack in the second position, about 7 inches from the top of the oven.

2. In a small bowl, mix together the peanut butter and maple syrup.

3. In a separate small microwave-safe bowl, toss together the graham cracker crumbs and the butter. Microwave on high, 10 to 15 seconds or until the butter is melted enough to mash into the crumbs with a fork; the mixture should resemble coarse sand. (Or, melt the butter and mix it into the crumbs.)

4. Slice a flour tortilla into 6 wedges. Arrange the wedges on a baking sheet. Lightly spritz the wedges with nonstick spray. Flip the wedges over. Lightly spritz the other side.

5. Smear a layer of the peanut butter mixture on top of the wedges. Gently press the marshmallows into the peanut butter. Sprinkle the graham cracker crumbs around the edges of the wedges, as a border. Toss the chocolate sprinkles in between and around the marshmallows.

6. Bake for about 3 minutes, until the marshmallows are toasty and golden on top. The nachos will be very hot, so cool them on the tray 1 or 2 minutes before serving. Serve warm, preferably with tall glasses of cold milk or a hot cuppa joe. Makes one 8-inch flour tortilla; serves 3 to 6