Hot stroke prevention

Living a healthy life can sometimes seem a little challenging. When you are offered a biscuit with morning tea, it’s hard to remind yourself that it is probably loaded with sugar and fat. Come lunch time you don’t even have to get out of your car to order a cheap three-course meal, but what are you really going to pay for it in the long run?

It can seem like health is synonymous with “denial” but it’s not really, it’s just about embracing other, healthier ways of being. Still, it’s nice when some news comes along saying that what you are doing anyway is good for your health. That is why many people will like a new study, which says that two popular hot drinks, coffee and green tea, can reduce your chance of having a stroke.

A stroke occurs when the blood supply to the brain is restricted, either through a blockage or bleeding. This cuts off the supply of oxygen to the brain causing damage to the affected cells. A stroke may cause paralysis, speech impairment, loss of memory and reasoning ability, coma or death, depending on where it happens in the brain.

In Australia around 60,000 people experience a stroke each year. Around 380,000 Australians report having had a stroke at some time and it is the second leading cause of death for women in Australia after coronary artery disease. The nature and prevalence of stroke mean that reducing your chance of having one is a very good thing. When you can do it with a nice warm cup of a favourite beverage, the news is even better.

These study results come from Japan and involved data gathered on more than 83,000 adults aged between 45 and 74 years, who were followed for a period of 13 years.

After adjusting for confounding factors like weight, diet and so on, the results showed that those who had four cups of green tea daily were between 20 and 30 per cent less likely to experience a stroke than those who drank no green tea at all. The researchers did note that green tea drinkers were more likely to do exercise than others. However, in addition to general lifestyle, they believe that it is the antioxidant catechins in green tea that yield the anti-stroke benefits.

As far as coffee drinking goes, there was an initial finding that those who drank two cups of coffee per day had an increased risk of heart disease. However, when the researchers removed those coffee drinkers who also smoked from the equation, that relationship disappeared. In fact, drinking more than one cup of coffee per day was associated with a 22-25 per cent drop in stroke risk compared to drinking no coffee at all. It is thought that chlorogenic acid from coffee may be behind this effect.

So, provided you are not doing something silly like puffing on a cigarette while you have it, your cup of coffee or green tea might not only be heart warming, it might be brain warming as well.