Gourmet Coffee Stops Decrease Gas Mileage;Home Brewed Premium Coffee Reduce Traffic Congestion

A researcher has stirred up the commuter coffee mug with the suggestion that morning rush hour traffic is worsened by stops for daily morning gourmet coffee at Starbucks and other premium coffee houses. Nancy McGuckin, a travel behavior analyst, studied a report called "National Household Travel Survey" by the U.S. Department of Transportation as the basis for her provocative conclusions.

It has long been known that frequent starting and stopping during a commute drastically reduces fuel economy due to the need to rev up the car engine to accelerate to traffic speeds and then stop for traffic lights and accelerate once again. This is the reason why manufacturers estimaged "city" mileage is always significantly lower than the estimated "highway" mileage. In addition, if the engine is turned off and restarted, mileage is decreased significantly, because it is at startup of the car engine that the most fuel is wasted.

Which Coffees are Highest in Antioxidants?

As researchers learn more about antioxidants with health and disease, they increasingly find themselves drawn to their influence on overall health. With them becoming an ever larger realm of study, people are looking for new ways to obtain high levels for them to be beneficial.

Since coffees are one of the most widely consumed beverages in the world, it was natural for researchers to test coffee.

Surprisingly, they found that some coffees have extremely high levels. The Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the University of Pavia in Pavia, Italy, studied the antioxidants present in the green and dark roasted coffees Coffee Arabica and Coffee robusta.

They found that all of the studied coffees showed a strong presence of them and also antiradical activity.

There was no difference found between the green and dark roasted coffee, indicating that the roasting process did not damage the natural presence in the coffee beans.

The School of Food Bio Sciences at The University of Reading, Whiteknights in Reading, United Kingdom looked at the effects of roasting coffee and if that negatively affects the presence of it in the bean.

Coffee from Guatemala

In Guatemala coffee grows in the heart of what was once the center of the Great Mayan Civilization. The Maya ruled this region of Central America from around 2500 B.C. until the arrival of Spanish Conquistadors in mid 1500 A.D.

Coffee arrived in Central America from the Caribbean around 1700 and local cultivation began shortly after. Commercial export of coffee from Guatemala did not begin until the mid 1800's as the square-rigged sailing ships of the day could only travel downwind. The trade winds blew the ships across the Atlantic toward the coast of Central America, but there was no easy way to sail back east. The advent of clipper ships around 1850, which could point higher into the wind, made commercial exports possible.