Caffeine drinks: a warning

from today's Times ... we're talking Red Bull (80mg caffeine per can*), Relentless (160mg), Cocaine (240mg per can) ... also Coke (35mg), and to some extent coffee (although you sip that because it's hot, whereas these cooled drinks are gulped, often several times a day):

Scott Willoughby, of the Cardiovascular Research Centre in Adelaide, Australia, recently showed how the sugar-free version of Red Bull can cause the blood to thicken, raising the risk of heart attacks and strokes.

In his study, Willoughby assessed the cardiovascular systems of 30 young adults one hour before and one hour after they had drunk a 250ml can of sugar-free Red Bull. He describes the results as "remarkable". Sixty minutes after drinking the Red Bull, the subjects displayed the kind of cardiovascular abnormalities that might be expected in a patient with heart disease, including an increased stickiness of blood.

"If you add in other risk factors for cardiovascular disease - stress or high blood pressure - this could be potentially deadly," Willoughby says. "The can comes with a warning of its own. But if you have any predisposition to cardiovascular disease, I'd think twice about drinking it."


*Caffeine stats from Professor Roland Griffiths, of The Johns Hopkins University, Maryland, USA. He found 505mg of caffeine in an American canned drink called Whoop Ass.

There's not much official UK guidance on this - according to The Times, just two pointers: any drink containing more than 150mg of caffeine per litre has to say so on UK labels; & the FSA advises pregnant women not to consume more than 300mg/caffeine per day.

Labels on fruit & other produce

You know those funny little irritating labels on fruit? The ones that tell you that, yes, you have picked up a Granny Smith or whatever? Well, they've got some seriously useful information on them, if you know how to translate the code.

They are actually called PLUs, that's Price Look Up in English. They are there to make things easier (and cheaper to run) for supermarkets, never mind that consumers really really don't want to have to remove little stickers from their apples. It's not much of a consolation to find that there are plans to overcome consumer resistance by branding fruit and vegetables with blueberry juice.

PLUs are numerical codes for loose produce, a sort of bar code for fruit and veg. All the numbers mean something - some for different types of fruit and veg, some for sizes, some for colour, some restrictive/geographic (to take account of both metric and imperial weights and measures). None of this needs consumer translation ... but there are two that do: they are both prefixes to four-figure numbers:

IF THE CODE STARTS WITH 9, the produce is ORGANIC

IF THE CODE STARTS WITH 8, the produce is GENETICALLY MODIFIED

You wouldn't believe how long it took to find this information - do you think they're trying to keep it secret from ordinary consumers? Or does that sound too much like paranoia? The reason I wanted to check it was to make sure that these two codes work everywhere in the world - and they do.

All over the world: 9 for organic, 8 for GM.

Just so's you know.

Full details of all the codes can be found at the International Federation for Produce Standards website. But those are the two you need (p 17 of the users' guide, which is a pdf). The examples they give, to be really clear, are: 94011 is an organic banana; 84805 is a GM vine-ripened tomato.

I mention this now, because fruit is such a good thing eat when you're out and about (check out Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall's diet), and I often forget to take it with me, so I end up buying it in the garage or at corner shops. Lucius has just had his hip replacement operation, so I'll be back and forth between home and the hospital for the next few days ... & probably forgetting fruit as often as not. I've just phoned the hospital, he's awake and everything's fine. I'm off right now.