Coffee, Alcohol, and More That May Affect RA

Rheumatoid arthritis

By Tammy Worth

About 1.3 million Americans are affected by rheumatoid arthritis, an autoimmune disease thought to be caused by genetic and environmental factors.

Strong medication can help prevent joint destruction and painful symptoms.

But there are other things that may affect RA risk and symptoms. In the big picture, these play relatively minor roles in RA (compared to, say, taking the right medication).

Still, here are some factors to keep in mind.

Smoking

One factor that affects RA is smoking, says Susan Goodman, MD, a rheumatologist at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City.

"Smoking clearly has an impact—it makes it worse and increases the likelihood of getting it," she says. "There clearly is something about smoking that is a bad actor."

RA nonsmokers have fewer swollen, painful joints than smokers, research suggests. RA smokers are three times as likely to have rheumatoid factor—a sign of more severe disease—and twice as likely to have joint damage.

Coffee

The link between coffee or tea and RA is debatable, Dr. Goodman says.

Research has suggested that decaf coffee (four or more cups a day) can increase the risk of getting RA, but caffeinated coffee has no impact, and tea may reduce risk. Other research found no correlation between decaf and RA.

One issue, though, is that coffee may make some RA medications, such as methotrexate (Rheumatrex, Trexall), less potent.

"There is not a consistent message there," Dr. Goodman notes. Check with your doctor; it may be fine to have a cup of joe.

Weather

While research on the topic is scant, there does seem to be a link between weather and RA symptoms. It is likely that barometric pressure and temperature changes have the biggest impact on symptoms.

"Many, many, many people say it, so my sense is it is something we just don't have an appropriate investigational design to test," Dr. Goodman says.

She says any change in climate tends to worsen symptoms—so RA patients may fare better when the weather is more consistent.

Next: Seasonal allergies

Credit: Corbis

20/07 Iced Coffee and Tea: (Not) Taking the Heat

THE CURIOUS COOK

Richard Perry/The New York Times

Mojito iced tea, suggesting the sweet aroma of white rum.

By HAROLD McGEE

Published: July 19, 2011

ICED coffees and teas should be some of summer’s simplest pleasures, especially when we just steep them in cold tap water, with no kitchen heat and next to no effort. But if you make even a desultory search for advice on cold brewing, you may find yourself mopping your brow deciding how, and even whether, to proceed.

Recipes

• Agua Fresca de Jamaica (July 20, 2011)

• Mojito Iced Tea (July 20, 2011)

Related

Diner's Journal: Harold McGee Will Answer Reader Questions on Brewing Coffee and Tea

• T Magazine: Ristretto | On the Rocks (June 10, 2011)

• The Dish | Endangered List: Iced Storm (May 6, 2007)

Enlarge This Image

Oliver Strand

A double-strength hot pour-over, with coffee directly over ice to dilute it.

Ratios of tea or coffee to water differ wildly from recipe to recipe; brewing times can be minutes or hours. And while some respected coffee authorities praise the virtues of cold-brewed coffee, others say it’s just not as good as brewing a fresh hot cup right onto the ice.

I’ve found it calming to take a leaf from China and Japan, where one batch of tea is briefly infused as many as seven or eight times and each infusion enjoyed for its particular qualities. Variety can be just as pleasing as consistency, and it can be a way to discover new sides of our most familiar ingredients.

When we brew coffee or tea, we’re doing a very basic thing: bringing plain water into contact with dried plant materials to imbue the water with flavor, color and various active substances, like caffeine and antioxidant polyphenols. It is a basic process, but not a simple one.

As water moves into the coffee particles or tea leaves, it dissolves or suspends hundreds of different substances and extracts them from the solids. If the water is hot, it extracts more rapidly and completely. Hot water also cooks as it extracts, forcing chemical reactions that transform some of the extracted substances into other things, and driving some aroma substances out of the liquid. Cold water, in contrast, extracts more slowly and selectively, produces a simpler extract, and doesn’t change the original flavor substances as much.

So cold-brewed teas and coffees are chemically different from their hot counterparts. They tend to contain less caffeine and less acid. And, of course, they taste different. If the flavor of hot tea or coffee is your gold standard, then cold brews won’t measure up. If you think of hot and cold brews as different drinks, just as a lager isn’t the same as a pale ale, then you may find that you enjoy both.

There are a variety of specialized devices for cold-brewing coffee, including showy ones that pass water very slowly through the grounds, drop by drop, and plain functional ones in which the coffee is left to infuse in all the water overnight, then the brew drained from the grounds. The best known of these, the Toddy, is a plastic container with a thick feltlike pad that fits over a stoppered hole in its bottom. When the stopper is removed, the liquid drains through the mass of grounds and the pad, which filter out tiny coffee particles, letting a dark yet clear coffee concentrate drain into a pitcher. The concentrate can be diluted with either cold or hot water for a quick drink. Because it’s quadruple-strength, it is also handy in cooking, to flavor things like ices and ice creams.

You can improvise a cold-brewing system using a French-press pot or just a pitcher or bowl, with fine sieves, cheesecloth, or cloth or paper filters to strain out the grounds. Infuse coarsely ground coffee overnight in cold water, about 5 cups for every 1/2-pound of coffee, then press or filter the brew from the grounds. In my experience this can become tedious because fine particles clog the filters. And if you leave particles in the brew, they cloud it and give it a rougher body.

Cold-brewed coffee is controversial. To summarize the substance of many recent interviews and blog posts: advocates praise its low acidity and lack of bitterness, and its intense but smooth flavor. Detractors find it lacking in aroma and body and say they get more of both by starting with a double-strength hot pour-over or French press. The pour-over, or a Chemex brew, can be made directly over ice cubes, the French press coffee added immediately to ice. With each, the ice melts and dilutes the coffee to an appropriate drinking strength. Some automatic coffee makers now offer settings and pre-measured coffee doses for brewing strong coffee onto ice.

The hot-brew argument sounded convincing to me, and I’d be happy not to need any special kit or forethought. But when I compared a 12-hour cold brew of freshly roasted Ethiopian coffee side by side with double-strength pour-overs brewed onto ice, each was good, and it was the cold brew that consistently tasted fruitier and more refreshing. That experiment made me a fan of cold-brewed coffee. It’s certainly worth trying. Both are an improvement over simply brewing hot coffee and chilling it for hours in the refrigerator, which gives a cloudy, less flavorful drink on its own, one that benefits from mixing with milk or cream and sugar.

Enlarge This Image

Richard Perry/The New York Times

Agua fresca de jamaica, using a hibiscus.

Recipes

• Agua Fresca de Jamaica (July 20, 2011)

• Mojito Iced Tea (July 20, 2011)

Related

Diner's Journal: Harold McGee Will Answer Reader Questions on Brewing Coffee and Tea

• T Magazine: Ristretto | On the Rocks (June 10, 2011)

• The Dish | Endangered List: Iced Storm (May 6, 2007)

When it comes to tea, there’s less controversy and more flexibility. The standard proportions for American iced tea are about 4 teaspoons or 2-gram bags per quart, with a brewing time of 8 to 12 hours. In Taiwan, where cold-brewed tea has become increasingly popular in recent years and spurred studies of its chemistry, about twice that ratio of tea to water is used for a similarly long infusion. And one purveyor of fine Japanese teas in Kyoto recommends making small cups of cold sencha with 5 times that ratio, infusing first for 15 minutes, then for briefer times. The first couple of infusions are like no other version of green tea I’ve had, intensely grassy and bitter, with subsequent brews progressively milder and more refreshing.

Since cold infusion is a relatively slow and gentle process, proportions and times aren’t critical. There’s plenty of leeway for both. As a general rule, the more fragile the tea leaves, or the smaller the particles, the less tea and time you need to get a strong brew. If a cold brew infuses too slowly, just add more tea.

Two of my favorite cold-brewed teas come from Maricel Presilla, who serves a number of them at her Latin restaurant Zafra in Hoboken, N.J. One perennial on her list is a mojito iced tea, in which oolong tea scented with osmanthus flowers, or with a sliced peach and its pit, suggests the sweet aroma of white rum.

Ms. Presilla also makes an unadorned agua fresca de jamaica, the tart, deep-red sepals that surround the flower of a particular species of hibiscus.

“Nothing compares to the bright color and flavor of the cold-infused drink,” she wrote in an e-mail. “It can steep for as little as two hours and needs nothing but some sugar, though you can include spices like cinnamon, allspice or star anise for a subtle but nice flavor.”

I like to use allspice and then muddle some fresh basil in the infusion just before serving.

Jamaica (pronounced ha-MY-ka) is especially rich in antioxidant polyphenolic compounds, including its anthocyanin pigments, and food chemists are investigating its potential as a nonalcoholic alternative to red wine. They have found that a two-hour cold infusion extracts as much of the pigments as a standard hot infusion, and that the flavor is fruitier and less marked by green-leaf, clove and cooked aromas.

Less heat may mean less flavor in coffees and teas, but not necessarily less pleasure.

A version of this article appeared in print on July 20, 2011, on page D5 of the New York edition with the headline: Iced Coffee and Tea: (Not) Taking the Heat.

Coffee, the New Shaky Commodity.Introduction

March 9, 2011

Leah Nash for The New York Times

Stumptown coffeehouse in Portland, Ore. Coffee prices are going up and up, as fast-rising demand in China and India puts pressure on the world's growers to increase their supplies. But, as detailed in a Times article by Elisabeth Rosenthal, farmers in a prime growing region of Colombia are finding that more intense rainstorms and warmer temperatures are making it harder to produce enough Arabica, the high-grade shade-grown varietal prized by those societies that can afford it.

While "peak coffee" may not be the same as peak oil, coffee is a commodity like no other. How will the heated market affect the ever evolving culture of coffee connoisseurship? What does history tell us about the role of coffee in unifying communities and advancing civilization, let alone in keeping everyone awake?


Read the Discussion »


A Renewable Resource

Updated March 9, 2011, 09:42 PM

Eugene N. Anderson is an emeritus professor of anthropology at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of “Everyone Eats" and of "Caffeine and Culture," an article in "Drugs, Labor and Colonial Expansion," edited by William Jankowiak and Daniel Bradburd.

In the short run, the shortage of good coffee will merely mean that people will plant more good coffee. This has happened many times in the past. Coffee is one of those classic commodities, like beef, that goes through cycles: when expensive, people grow more, but the crop takes a few years to mature, by which time the plantings have produced a glut, so people cut production, and the cycle starts over again. Every economics textbook discusses this.

Coffee, unlike oil, can be replaced, so the connoisseurship culture is in no danger. .At present, we observe that countries like Mexico are trying -- slowly and with some setbacks -- to upgrade from low-quality coffee to good shade-grown Arabica. Other countries, notably China and Vietnam, could easily follow this route. Others have lots of Arabica already but could expand plantings enormously. So I doubt if this shortage is for the long term. Unlike oil, coffee can be increased worldwide.

Coffee is a unique commodity. Basically, that's because it's the best way to wake yourself up. Tea is fine too but somewhat less convenient and often made rather weak. Chocolate has too many calories -- you can't very well drink a dozen cups of it in a morning. The wake-up aspects of coffee made it the great social facilitator everywhere it went. It stimulates the social and intellectual side of humans, rather than putting them to sleep as alcohol tends to do.

Everywhere it has gone, informal but real ceremonies have grown up around coffee, just as ceremonies (often much more formal and even sacred) have grown up around other caffeine sources: tea, chocolate and yerba mate.

Incidentally, in dramatic contrast to wine, coffee has never been worshiped. Tea is associated with religion in East Asia, but not really worshiped as such. (By contrast, chocolate was an extremely sacred drink, used in the highest and most solemn rituals, in pre-Columbian Mexico and Central America.) Thus, rising taste in the arts of life generally mean that people want better coffee, tea and chocolate — connoisseurship of all three has developed in parallel in the Western world over the last 30 years.

This is bound to put upward pressure on prices, as demand growth outpaces supply, but the normal laws of economics more or less guarantee a corresponding increase in supply in the near future.

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