Storms in coffee and tea cups

By Julia Watson
United Press International

WASHINGTON, March 17 (UPI) -- Coffee and tea are stirring up storms in their cups again. Coffee consumption, sharply reduced in the household of British Prime Minister Tony Blair by his wife Cherie following his racing heart health scare last year, is now said to be good for that capricious but resolute organ.

Dietician Chiara Trombetti of the Humanitas Gavazzeni institute in the northern Italian town of Bergamo says that far from giving you palpitations, coffee helps improve the circulation within the heart. It's the tannin and antioxidants that do it. And if that's not recommendation enough, she says it can also help prevent cirrhosis of the liver, stave off gallstones and relieve headaches. What's more, asthma attacks could be reduced by coffee's caffeine content.

Women in 15th century Egypt and Turkey would not be surprised at any of this. They had the right to a divorce if their husband denied them their daily quota of coffee. It was the nomadic Galla tribe of Ethiopia that realized sometime before 1000 A.D. that their daily helping of a particular local berry, which they ground up and molded with animal fat into a ball, was giving them an energy charge. That bean, of course, was coffee. Arab traders brought it home and turned it into a boiled drink they called "qahwa" -- "sleep preventer." By the 15th century, it was drunk daily across the Middle East.

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