Lazy Monday

What a muggy weekend. I think the dogs are suffering from a bad case of mildew.

I sit here this fine Monday morning making my list of things that absolutely have to be done today. Most of today's list is made up of things that absolutely had to be yesterday. I also sit here drinking my coffee.

Coffee is one of my drugs of choice, my others being aspirin and red wine. There's always a debate about caffein but I like the buzz and now there's more juice added to the debate with coffee being labelled a good source of soluble fiber. Even better news is that red wine is also a good source of soluble fiber. Aspirin is apparently not.

Mirko Bunzel in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry:

"The most important message of this paper," he says, "is that coffee's dietary fiber is really a good [food] for gut microflora." In terms of health, he concludes, ingesting coffee's fiber is "a good thing."

But what about tea?

"...will tea drinkers like me derive a similar benefit from our favorite beverage? That's unlikely, Bunzel says, because brewed tea doesn't seem to have fiber. However, he points to a paper that the Spanish group published last year in the American Journal of Enology and Viticulture that might offer an alternative to both tea and coffee: wine."

Allright! Coffee and red wine...I figure my gut microflora ought to be damned healthy after this last weekend. Throw in some aspirin to keep my arteries clear, with the side effect of lessening the pains in my knees, and assorted other joints and body parts, and I'm doing ok. This comes up after the weekend because last Saturday was the celebration of one woman putting up with me for the last 23 years, officially, and unofficially, a few years longer than that.

Red wine and aspirin may help with her situation, too.

Cheers,

Steve

Here's the official report for those of you who like to read such things.