Cafe con chocolate

El otro día vi el programa Un Café Con Paul Bassett episodio 12 en Travel & Living de Discovery.

Entrevistaba al Dr. Karl Kruszelnicki quien hablaba de los efectos de la cafeína. Lo interesante es que decís que los efectos vasoconstrictores de la cafeína podían ser "neutralizados" si se tomaba el café junto con una pequeña porción de chocolate amargo.

Busqué en medline y parece haber algunas referencias sobre los efectos del chocolate sobre el endotelio y la vasodilatación, pero no sé si son muy significativos. No cuesta nada probar. Yo creo que se podía agregar cacao amargo en polvo al café si no se consigue chocolate amargo que es caro.

Karl Kruszelnicki - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Lo que dijo en el programa es similar a esto ,también mostró unos libros interesantes (sobre mitos del saber y otros, ver Wikipedia o su sitio):

The “Half Life”, T1/2, of a drug is the time taken for your body to metabolise, or break down, half the amount that you have in your blood stream. After another T1/2, the level of the drug in the blood stream has dropped to half of its previous level - or 25% of the original level. After the third half life, the drug is down to 12.5% of its peak level.

In humans, the caffeine half life, Caff-T1/2 varies from 3.5 to 100 hours - depending on what kind of human you are.

If you’re an adult, half the caffeine has gone from your system after 5-6 hours. But if a woman uses the oral contraceptive pill, her caffeine half life doubles to about 12 hours.

Pregnant women, have the same half life as your regular adult - until they get to about three months pregnant. Then from four to nine months, the Caff-T1/2 increases to about 10-18 hours. So for this pregnant woman, a little coffee goes a long way. But by one week after birth, the Caff-T1/2 is back down to around six hours.

Caffeine can leave the blood stream of the nursing mother, and go into her breast milk to the baby - and sometimes keep it awake, and inconsolable. The caffeine hangs around in the baby for a long time. The half life of caffeine in a premature or a new-born baby is around 100 hours. But the time the babies are 8 months old, they’re really good at getting rid of caffeine, and the Caff-T1/2 is down to four hours.

Smokers also have a very short Caff-T1/2 (3.5 hours), so they can also clear the caffeine out of their bodies rapidly. This might explain why smokers tend to drink more coffee than non-smokers. Also, when smokers give up tobacco, they become more sensitive to the effects of caffeine. They may need to cut down their coffee intake, when they give up smoking. (That’s a bit unfair - having to drop your intake of two drugs at the same time.)
http://www2.abc.net.au/science/k2/stn/december1999/posts/topic14651.shtm