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The sweet smell of de-stress
Wed Aug 6 2008The trial carried out by researchers at Seoul National University used sleep deprived, and therefore stressed, laboratory rats as its subjects. The researchers reported that inhaling the aroma of roasted coffee beans caused the activation of a number of genes, including some that produce proteins with beneficial antioxidant activity.
Dr Peter Martin, director of the Institute of Coffee Studies at Vanderbilt University, said, 'The meaning of it is not totally clear yet. What it does show is that coffee smells do change the brain to some degree, and it behooves us to understand why that is happening'.
The study, led by Han-Seok Seo, included details showing increased activity in 11 genes and decreased activity in two genes in the rodents that smelled the coffee, compared to those which did not smell it. The effect of this process was the easing of stress in the sleep-deprived rats.
Seo said, 'These results indirectly explain why so many people use coffee for staying up all night, although the volatile compounds of coffee beans are not fully consistent with those of the coffee extracts. In other words, the stress caused by sleep loss via caffeine may be alleviated through smelling the coffee aroma'.
Martin explained, 'They used the latest in technology to see how brain expression of RNA (the molecule that carries out the instructions encoded in genes) changed. This is just the beginning of a very interesting line of investigation'.
The antioxidants within liquid coffee are polyphenols and those in the smell are heterocycle compounds. Commenting on the study, Joe Vinson, a chemistry professor at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania said, 'There are two ways to get things into your system, and the quickest way is to smell them. Caffeine gets into the brain via the blood stream. Here, aromatic molecules get into the brain through the olfactory system. The levels in the air are parts per million, so obviously these are minor components in the air. But they are doing something'.
Source: Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry
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