Posted in Breast Cancer, Caffeine, Cancer, Chocolate, Coffee, Fibrocystic Breasts, Tea on December 3rd, 2008
Many women suffer from tender breast tissue. The issue is complicated by fear of breast cancer.
However, a very simple solution may be at hand. A caffeine-free diet.
Breast surgeon, Sharon Rosenbaum Smith, MD of St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital in New York City, says, “The biggest contributing factor to fibrocystic change in the breasts is caffeine.”
Remember, though, caffeine is not just coffee. She adds, “In some women, avoiding caffeine works, but it has to be the complete avoidance of caffeine.”
The advice is, to remove all caffeine from your diet for two to three months on a trial basis. That means tea, coffee, caffeinated soda and chocolate in all its forms.
It would also be a good idea to consult a doctor first.
Posted in Addiction, Antioxidants, Coffee, Tea, Withdrawal Symptoms on May 1st, 2008
For most people coffee is an innocuous beverage associated with hanging out among friends in Starbucks or more gentile tearooms.
For others — let’s call them power users — it’s a nasty addiction that causes heart palpitations, panic attacks and other alarming side effects. The main culprit, of course, is caffeine.
We should be aware that caffeine is present in quantity in chocolate and many soft drinks, like Coca Cola, and less so in various teas. It’s hard to escape.
So how can you give it up? Here’s a simple Sideways method that will cause you little pain and avoids the withdrawal symptoms often referred to as “cold turkey”. It involves an eight-day tapering down period which gently eases you off what has now become a poison to you.
Don’t give up coffee overnight. That just condemns you to four or five days of headaches and nausea. Try switching to tea instead. This means the English variety of black tea. Black tea has some caffeine but less than coffee, so the jump is not a quantum leap.
After four days of that, switch to green tea, which has very little caffeine, but huge health benefits from the high levels of antioxidants.
You can actually stick with green tea after the four days, if you like the taste — many don’t — but this is the point at which you can say goodbye to caffeine completely.
It’s up to you.
