Coffee, It's Good For You
Have that second cup of coffee, it's not bad for you. As a matter of fact, a recent study shows that those who drink three to five cups of coffee a day are less likely to suffer from Parkinson's disease, Diabetes and Alzheimer's, as well as various types of cancers, according to French scientist, Astrid Nehlig.

Nehlig was in Costa Rica at the invitation of the Instituto del Café de Costa Rica (Icafe), to promote the benefits of drinking coffee.

Nehlig says that consuming coffee increases energy, attention and good health and directly protects against Parkinson's, Diabetes and Alzheimer.

Coffee, Nehlig says, increases good spirits, alertness and self confidence, and helps with concentration.

Coffee is a natural beverage that is low in calories and rich in potassium, an element that improves muscle contraction, including the hearth. It also contains calcium andmagnesium that plays an important role in the central nervous system.

Nehlig, in her research found that coffee protects against mouth and stomach cancer, along with reducing headaches and migraines.

Though people have been ingesting caffeine for millennia, not until 1820 was the chemical structure of caffeine - the stimulant in coffee and tea that inspires its devotion - finally identified. Only in the last 200 years, then, have we come to have anything close to a true grasp on how this deceptively powerful drug affects our body and brain.

Caffeine is a rather lumpy molecule that, unlike alcohol -  which is shaped in a way so as to make it fairly indiscriminant about what it binds to -  tends to attach itself to very few molecules in the body. When an attachment is made, however, the fit is tight, and the interaction much stronger than that of alcohol. This is why one cup of coffee -  which holds about 100 milligrams of caffeine - can have a physiological effect on the body that is as powerful, although different, as one beer, which holds about 14,200 milligrams of alcohol.

Astrid Nehlig and her colleagues at the French National Institute for Health and Medical Research, say caffeine is not addictive event though it shares some effects with addictive drugs like cocaine.

The researchers injected rats with a radioactive form of glucose, as well as with varying amounts of caffeine -between the human equivalents of one and ten cups of coffee - and then they examined levels of blood flow to regions of the brain known to be involved in the brain's reward system. One such region, called the nucleus accumbens, has been shown to be affected by cocaine. Nehlig's results showed that caffeine did not seem to affect the nucleus accumbens