Tea at Trianon: The More Coffee You Drink

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, February 24, 2019

The More Coffee You Drink

From Healthy Holistic Living:

Despite the ongoing debate, coffee has long since been correlated with longer life and better health. (1,2) However, a new and extensive study conducted in the UK may have just broken some serious ground, measuring a factor that hasn’t been specifically weighed in the discussion of coffee and longevity: metabolism. (3)

A study done by researchers from the U.S. National Cancer Institute and Northwestern University using data from the UK Biobank measured the mortality of a massive study group of over 500,000 subjects over a 10 year period. Researchers analyzed the number of cups of coffee subjects consumed on average each day, using non-coffee drinkers as a reference group. The also “investigated potential effect modification by caffeine metabolism,” meaning the impact of their bodies’ ability to metabolize and utilize caffeine more or less quickly.

Researchers used what is called a hazard ratio to illustrate how much of an effect they observed the variable of coffee drinking to have on the subjects health and lifespan. In this case, a ratio of 1 would mean that there was no observable impact of coffee drinking whatsoever, while a ratio of 0.5 would indicate that coffee drinking subjects were half as likely to die as the non-drinkers. The ratios they assigned to the drinkers of 1-8 cups of coffee a day were ranged from 0.94 – 0.86. This concluded that coffee drinkers of any amount faced a 6% – 14% lower chance of death, which researchers maintain is a hugely significant figure. (Read more.)