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Cinnamon

My Swedish cousin Eva read my blog on cinnamon the other day and had these comments to pass along:

Your coffee mixture sounds very good and tasteful. Home grind coffee beans, chocolate and cinnamon, but be careful though! Cinnamon contains coumarin, a substance which can be harmful in bigger quatities and damage your liver. It has also been very popular here in Sweden with all kinds of cinnmon products. At first everybody praised it to the skies, but lately it has been warnings against it because of the coumarin. (The investigations of the substance coumarin came from the German authorities). Cassia-cinnamon, from China, contains more coumarin than the finer Ceylon-variant. I don’t know the exactly amount of cinnamon you can eat a day, but from the articles I have read about the danger of eating to much cinnamon, they just recommend cinnamon in normal doses. Like when you spread it over your morning porridge and so on. Here’s an other example: If your weight is 75 kilo, you shouldn’t eat more than 7,5 mg coumarin a day. But who knows how much cinnamon you have to eat before you get that amount of coumarin?? I’ve tried to find that kind of figures, but it seems impossible :-( Well, I don’t think you have to be afraid to eat your cinnamon, but do it with moderation ;-)

So, I went to my friendly Wikipedia and looked up Coumarin - there, I've saved you the trouble. Anyway, it sounds to me like coumarin is the anticoagulant drug I'm used to hearing called Coumadin. Interesting that its scent is the sweet odor we recognize from newly cut grass. It's also a common food and tobacco additive, although both have been banned in many countries for quite some time. That said, it sounds like the tobacco industry keeps trying to slip it into those dreadful cigarettes! Interestingly enough it is a potent rodenticide, and is still shows up in pipe tobacco.....ummmmm, that nice sweet smell, eh?

Well enough on that!

My thanks to Pixie for helping me get my Artful Quilters Web Ring logo back up and running. It seems that when I switched over to the new and improved blogger (notice how new and improved my blog appears! Ha!!!) I lost all of my added templates. Slowly but surely I'm getting them back, but it takes someone like me who is pretty much totally computer illiterate many long hours to accomplish this, and there are just so many other fascinating things to do in one's day!

As part of our Wednesday night program at church last night, I retook the Myers Briggs Personality Test. I'll get my results back next week....and we'll see how they compare with the my results from the online test that I took a month ago.

On that note, I'm off to work........catch you later....and don't forget to monitor your Coumarin intake!!