Sunday, December 31, 2006


coffee anti-oxidants

long-time readers know that i've often written (for example, here) about coffee's health benefits, as the latest peer-reviewed science is published. most of these benefits appear tied to coffee's powerful anti-oxidants, such as chlorogenic acid.

these anti-oxidants are said to appear richly both in the coffee bean and the coffee fruit. coffee lovers know that the coffee cherry is usually discarded in processing, and has little use.

in some arab countries, the cherries are left to dry on the bean and then separated to make a kind of tea, qishr, which is said to have a sickening jolt of caffeine and to taste really bad. ginger is often added to it to make it more palatable, i'm told.

the fresh cherry, by those friends of mine who have tasted them, is reported to be quite sweet, but again, has so much caffeine that it makes you soon regret eating them.

and this is to be expected; after all, the coffee tree developed this caffeine power as a natural defense against insects. most bugs seem to find it repulsive tasting, if not outright poisonous.

so it appears there really aren't any serious uses for the coffee cherry. wait! not so fast. . .

as anti-oxidants have become the lastest beauty product craze, a new company, revale, is releasing a skin care line containing coffee cherry. but at just a 1% coffee cherry extract concentration, i'm pretty skeptical as to how effective it could be.

you'll notice the company's website features only green coffee cherries, not ripe ones. this is because the extract they use seems to be made from the unripe fruit, which may have more anti-oxidant compounds than the beautiful ripe red cherries.

nonetheless, dear readers, i'll probably be mailing off for a sample when the final product is released in spring 2007. stay tuned!

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