The new models are more physiologically appropriate for these steroid effects than three other models that are commonly employed in pharmacodynamics. Steroid effects generally appear to be receptor mediated with either nongene immediate responses or gene-mediated delayed effects.
These models allow quantitation of the rapid effects of steroids with simple equations and common fitted parameters for all steroid dose levels. Ludwig, PharmD, Richard L. Slaughter, MS, Providence M. Jusko, PhD Buffalo, N. The diverse immunosuppressive and the anti- prehensive kinetic and dynamic models for this class inflammatory effects of glucocorticoids in human of agents.
This is partly because of the complex mode beings complicate the development of realistic and corn- of action of corticosteroids, which involves receptor binding and the formation of second messengers and proteins which is mediated by deoxyribonucleic acid From the Departments of Pharmaceutics, Pharmacy, and Medicine, Schools of Pharmacy and Medicine, State University of New York [DNA].
Such responses are typically characterized by at Buffalo, and the Department of Pharmacy and the Division of a slow and delayed induction period. GM from the National Institute of prednisolone effects in rats. However, the model lacks a physiologic sociation and dephosphorylation of the receptor, this structure in that it does not consider circadian patterns complex is rapidly transformed to an activated steroid- of T cells trafficking in and out of blood.
Also, the receptor form. Presumably, one form of this complex ability to extrapolate between doses and administration elicits the direct suppression effect on the release of methods is not feasible because of the different model corticotropin-releasing factor CRF from the hypo- parameter values that were needed for each dose of thalamus and the release of corticotropin from the an- prednisolone.
Recent evidence sug- in the loss of stimulatory secretion of cortisol from the gests that glucocorticoids inhibit pro-opiomelanocortin adrenal glands and, consequently, the loss of the normal POMC gene transcription in the anterior pituitary circadian rhythm.
The subsequent monoexponential de- lobes of rats by 10 minutes and reach maximal effects cline of serum cortisol is therefore dependent on its within 20 minutes.
The inhibition of the release CRF scription has been reported for the interleukin gene. These observations, together with other facts presented C. Cortisol model. The circadian rhythm of baseline In this article we examine the pharmacokinetics of cortisol concentrations with the incorporation of its ep- methylprednisolone succinate and methylprednisolone isodic nature has been kinetically modeled.
However, our pri- a simple cosine function can also be used to approxi- mary purpose is to propose simple direct suppression mate the temporal profile of the circadian rhythm of pharmacodynamic models to couple the serum concen- cortiso1. These models may apply to an array of other corticosteroid and drug effects. The numeric ratio in and from within the cell binds reversibly to phospho- equation 3 converts the hour period into degrees and protein cytosolic receptor typically termed glucocor- subsequently into radians for the te time functions.
The two equations should be interconvertible by use of phannacokinetic methods for interrelating DF in the cy- tosol to Cmp in plasma. This concept is essentially Histamine Basophils Clark's "occupancy theory" of drug-receptor interac- tion.
Blood histamine model. Glucocorticoids cause a rapid shift of circulating leukocytes, including mono- Fig. Diagrammatic representation of the direct suppression cy-tes, basophils, and eosinophils, to extravascular com- models. Top figure depicts the circadian secretion and partments such as the bone marrow and the lymphoid suppression model of cortisol. Bottom figure depicts the two- tissues. Itc0r,, Circadian concentration of cor- ceptors are implicated in the affected cells.
Sufficiently large doses of steroids course of plasma cortisol C after a bolus dose of produce a monoexponential decline of blood histamine methylprednisolone is shown in Fig. The model Fig. Health status checking the system against equilibrium dialysis.
One Cortisol concentrations that were below the HPLC subject reported occasional marijuana use one to two detection limit i. Subjects abstained from drug use for at agnostic Products Corp. The least 1 month before the start of the study. The sample size was The dose equivalents of methylprednisolone sodium increased from 25 to pi The standard curve ranged succinate given were The from 1.
All assays were performed in administration of each dose was separated by 1 week, duplicate and were counted with an LKB gamma and the crossover sequencing of dosage administration counter LKB Diagnostics, Inc. The standard curve was regressed with a Spline pro- At the start of each study day approximately 8 Am , gram.
The lowest concentration of the standard curve, a gauge angiocatheter was inserted into an arm vein 1. Blood samples were terday coefficients of variation of 2. For this assay, R1 whole blood were added to Whole blood p. The remaining polycarbonate tubes and placed in a boiling water bath blood was separated immediately to harvest plasma.
The remaining for assay. The standard curve ranged from 1. Urine was collected obtained with iteratively reweighted least-squares anal- during the following intervals: 0 to 1, 1 to 2, and 2 to ysis by use of PCNONLIN Statistical Consultants, 12 hours after steroid administration. Lexington, Ky. The lowest concentration of the stan- Assays. Plasma and urine methylprednisolone suc- dard curve, 1.
Noncompartmental analysis was used were determined by use of the HPLC procedure of to obtain the pharmacokinetic parameters. Interday AUC was determined by Lagrange" polynomial in- and intraday variability for both assay procedures for terpolation and integration with use of the least-squares both compounds was below 7. Excellent agreement terminal slope X to extrapolate to infinity. Differences between the various means were tested for significance by use of the Tukey multiple comparison test.
For comparison purposes, the blood histamine data employed as fractional change from baseline were fitted to three alternative effect models: the Ema model, the sigmoid Ema model, and the "threshold" Emax model as used by other investigators. Visual in- spection of the fittings, sum of square deviations, cor- relation coefficients r , and plots of residuals were used to compare results from the different models.
Disposition of methylprednisolone and methylpred- Methylprednisolone succinate disappeared in a slightly nisolone succinate inset in a representative subject after biexponential fashion, with a t2 of about 0.
The administration of 10 circles , 20 squares , and 40 mg tri- mean data for all dose levels are presented in Table I. The Vss averaged 0. The renal clearance CLR of stant for three doses. The mean pharmaco- ylprednisolone for each individual subject at each dose kinetic parameters at each dosage level are presented level were also fitted to a monoexponential function in Table II. No statistical differences in CL, Vss, 42, equation 1 by use of the nonlinear least-squares or X were found.
The result- plotted Fig. This may be in- were then used in fitting their individual effect data dicative of occasional nonlinearity in the conversion of cortisol and blood histamine to the pharmacodynamic methylprednisolone succinate to methylprednisolone. In addition, a combined The general constancy of parameters is indicative of fit of effects for all the dose levels and baseline for the linear kinetics of methylprednisolone, which is consis- cortisol model simultaneously was undertaken to ex- tent with previous findings.
Solid circles are two subjects who showed a slower MPHS clearance after the Table I. Pharmacokinetic parameters for methylprednisolone succinate Dose mg Parameter This is identical to binding would allow for a suitable rate of return of cortisol to data obtained previously in humans. As shown in Fig. The circadian rhythm of plasma agreement between the observed and the predicted pro- concentrations of cortisol in a representative subject is files.
The episodic nature of cortisol secre- Fig. Our aim here was not to model centrations of cortisol after the three intravenous doses this complication, which has been accomplished pre- of methylprednisolone succinate. Plasma concentrations of cortisol in the same subject during baseline solid circles and after 10 open circles , 20 TIME, h squares , and 40 triangles mg doses of methylpredniso- Fig. Whole blood histamine concentration-versus-time pro- lone.
Symbols are experimental data and lines are least- file in one subject at baseline dotted line and after 10 squares regression lines fitted by equations 2, 3, and 4. Symbols are experimental data and solid lines are least-squares regression lines fitted to equation 7.
The best fitting of these data simultaneously to our model provides a reasonable quantitation of the baseline, the decline, and the return of cortisol for all three dose levels, except for several basophils6'" and is similar to lymphocyte' data. The data points at 18 to 21 hours. In some places, it's almost as if the author has had a personal relationship with the spirit of each plant.
A Feast. By A Reader These three books are beautiful. Poetic, informative, sneakily subversive, and personal. People looking for a straight textbook read might not like them as much, but I couldn't put them down. Posting Komentar. Rabu, 26 Maret [A Most helpful customer reviews 2 of 2 people found the following review helpful. See all 18 customer reviews Diposting oleh Nannie Yang di Label: Ebooks.
Tidak ada komentar:. Langganan: Posting Komentar Atom. They used gunpowder for blasting and to fire rockets and projectiles. Their skills in medicines would not be equaled in the West for eight centuries. The extensive civil service was open to anyone who could pass the written examination covering science, art, philosophy, and history, providing a merit-based system for entrance into the government. After a hundred years of Mongol rule, the Ming dynasty was founded in and tried to reestablish the historical Chinese traditions.
Ming Chinese drank loose leaf tea, but the art of whisking powdered tea was preserved in Japan. Drinking tea, eating rice, I pass my time as it comes. The Plant Tea was brought to Japan by Buddhist monks. Saicho served tea to Emperor Saga, a Smophile who soon made tea a regular part of court life.
Tea was served to Buddhist monks visiting the palace. Tea became featured at poetry parties, where the guests composed linked-verse renga. But when Saga died, the brief flowering of tea culture faded, except in the monasteries where the use of dancha, brick tea, was preserved. When he returned he founded Rinzai Zen. Eisai brought back the Sung powdered tea, matcha, and wrote a book about its medicinal values. He also brought back seeds, which he planted at several locations.
Zen also flourished, the samurai class especially taking to it. Perhaps also, in the elegant sociability of tea, the samurai found a tempering to the blood-letting inclinations ot their blades. Zen gave them a spiritual discipline, and tea gave them poetry and culture things true soldiers must certainly crave. Mao wrote a tract about that. The Vlant Tea in Japan is a story of poetry, a story of flowers and swords, and a story of Zen.
The aesthetics articulated by the hokku and renga poets shaped the tea-house, and most of the poets were students of Zen. The drinking of matcha tea spread from the temples to the general population all through the Kamakura period, Zen temples sponsored large tea- drinkings for certain celebrations, to which the local townspeople were invited.
The aristocracy likewise revived tea drinking, and tea contests appeared again. Tea became a central feature of summer bathing parties. The guests soaked in hot water, drank tea and sake, and composed renga poetry while local villagers came and gawked.
In the Imperial Court, many of the Zen rules. Zen aesthetics were adopted as well. Calligraphic scrolls were displayed in Chinese-style rooms. The idea that the serving of tea could be a spiritual path came from Murata Juko, a student of the great poet and iconoclastic Zen master Ikkyu — Ikkyu asked for a cup of tea. The Ally Autumn is near— I feel the pull of the four-and-a-half mat room.
Ikkyu distrusted blind adherence to rules, and Juko followed his lead. Juko sought to erase the distinctions between Chinese treasures and locally made Japanese pottery. Again taking his lead from the poets, J60 created wabi as the aesthetic ideal of tea. Wabi comes as close as any word to describing the whole tone of Japanese aesthetic sensibility, from haiku to No drama to flower arranging. While the thatched hut had never been forgotten by the Japanese poets, it was perhaps honored more in theory than in practice, at least until Basho.
But before Rikyu there had been little of the thatched hut in the refined perfection of the tea room. Rikyu added the thatch. He also lowered the door so that it was necessary to stoop to enter the room. But none of it was arbitrary. As might be expected, this hyper-refme- ment of taste was eagerly sought after by the nobility of which Rikyu—born merely into a wealthy merchant family—was not.
Rikyu served as tea master under Odu Nobunaga, who had unified much of Japan. Rikyu was one of the first tea masters to cultivate morning glories. When he arrived every trace of the vines had been cleaned out, and he entered the tea room in a smouldering rage.
There in the alcove was a single morning glory, deeply tinged and exquisitely beautiful. Hideyoshi understood and was full of praise. Rikyu became known as the foremost tea practitioner in Japan. He also became the personal confidant of Hideyoshi. It was said that no one could speak with Hideyoshi without going through Rikyu. Hide- filled a large bronze bowl with water and placed it in the alcove. The open blossoms and buds floated together on the surface of the water.
Hideyoshi appeared delighted, confessing that he had tried to embarrass Rikyu, but that the man could not be flustered. Some Jesuits, who were mixing in Japanese politics at the time, even claimed that Rikyu was a Christian.
But above all he insisted that without naturalness and spontaneity the ceremony was a sham. That was the true lesson of tea. As a general rule concerning the cleaning of the roji [the entrance garden, through which the arriving guests walked through on stepping stones], if guests are to come in the morning, one should s weep the previous evening; if at noon, one should sweep in the morning. Rikyu eventually fell from grace.
Having united Japan, Hideyoshi was making plans to invade Korea. Rikyu was in the dove party, advising against the plan. To make matters worse, his daughter had refused to become one of Hideyoshfs concubines. Rikyu had promoted and supported this project earnestly, but as more and more of the funding was withdrawn in anticipation of the planned invasion, it began to appear that the gate might not be completed.
He also commissioned a wooden statue of himself to be carved and mounted over the gate. In Hideyoshi ordered him to commit seppuku, ritual suicide. Rikyu held a last tea for his close disciples.
After the tea he dismissed all of his guests but one. He unwrapped the short sword, composed a death poem, cut himself open, and died. Seventy years of life— Ha ha! And what a fuss! With this sacred sword of mine, I do kill both Buddhas and Patriarchs.
History Tea was unknown in Europe until the latter sixteenth century. Arabian travelers visiting Canton had mentioned tea as early as , and Marco Polo made note of a Chinese official who was deposed for arbitrarily raising the tea tax, but these were lost fables. Almeida, an experienced missionary who had also been trained in medicine.
As the Jesuits began to realize the importance of tea drinking in the life of their prospective converts, the missionaries were encouraged to become acquainted with the practice. Reports of chanoyu, the tea ceremony, appeared soon after in their writings, along with detailed instructions on maintaining a tea room and serving cha. Tea arrived in Lisbon in , and the Portuguese were the first Europeans to drink it. The missionary zeal of the Jesuits, as well as their predilection for mixing in local power struggles, was finally their undoing.
The isolation saved their country. Japan s only import need was silk. For this they traded copper. The Dutch, in turn, traded the copper to China for silk. For tea, the Chinese wanted silver, or gold. All of the tea drunk in Europe came from China. All of it came through Canton. Relativity seeks Adjustment; Adjustment is Art. The Ally Tea is in my opinion a phantasticum, coffee an energeticum—tea therefore possesses a disproportionately higher artistic rank.
One exceeds his inhibitions. With tea, on the other hand, the thoughts climb genuinely upward. History The Dutch were the first European tea merchants.
From early in the seventeenth century until the Dutch East India Company was the richest corporation in the world, employing 20, sailors, 10, soldiers, and 50, civilians. Manchu China bore little resemblance to the sophisticated and cosmopolitan Sung.
The government, foreigners themselves, distrusted other foreigners. For two hundred years, while the tea trade grew exponentially to become one of the largest single items of European commerce, the Europeans had no knowledge of where tea actually came from, how or where it was grown, what it looked like, or how it was processed.
The result, in any case, was the invasion and subsequent looting of China. A Brief Meander By the early nineteenth century, European inflation caused by the Napoleonic through Opium wars and by the strange attractors inherent in capitalism, had reduced the market value of tea relative to silver. And as the Chinese demanded silver for tea, the East India Company found itself in a severe economic squeeze.
The Company found a nearly perfect solution in opium. The priority of the East India Company was profit, not conquest. Nonetheless, by , when the French and Indian War broke out, the Company had subjugated much of India, if haphazardly. A former clerk, Robert Clive, beat the French at the Battle of Plassey, and British control of India, and her monopoly on opium, was secure. Clive also seized the immense treasure trove that the regional Indian kings had been hoarding for centuries.
China had outlawed opium in , an anti-drug law that had as much to do with the Confucian moral and religious attitudes of the ruling mandarins as with public health issues. Some of the rationale may also have been economic.
Either way, the law was tragically wrong-headed. Black market conditions meant that the British could demand silver for their opium. The black market opium trade was originally in the hands of the Portuguese. When the English took over the trade at cannon point, it amounted to about 3, pounds of opium per year.
Over the next century the British increased this trade to 3 million pounds a year. The British declared war and attacked China with both land and naval forces. Culture and economy both declined. Chinese art treasures flowed to the West. Corruption was rampant. But even without the looting and the corruption the result would have been the same. That a country that had been one of the most advanced civilizations in the world for more than four millennia fell so easily is worthy of study.
Other cases of advanced cultures falling to less advanced civilizations come to mind: the Conquest of Mexico, surely, and the Norman Conquest of Not that the Europeans of the nineteenth century were barbarians, but they had certainly been playing catch-up to the country that had been the technological leader of the world for most of their history.
It is important to be clear about the dynamics here. A state-supported monopoly power was able to produce cheap, commodified opium by force and threat of arms.
Monopoly control of another drug, tea, by both trading partners, created an economic niche begging for exploitation. Commodified opium had entirely different dynamics, which were only made more destructive when the commodity was forced into the black market. It created gangs, corrupt officials, distrust and disrespect for the government, and finally, the virtual dissolution of the country.
The Plant mary cassatt, England could have grown coffee in her the cup of tea colonies, so why did the English change to tea? Some of the taste for tea probably emanated from Catherine. Charles the Second, the Restored, married Catherine ol Bra- ganza. She had learned tea drinking in Portugal, and had brought her taste with her to England.
It is said that, Charles, if he did not love her deeply, nonetheless showed every concern for her happiness and made sure she was supplied with tea. Venus her Myrtle, Phoebus has his bays, Tea both excels, which she vouchsafes to praise. Still, coffee held on. Perhaps tea was more easily domesticated, was more easily a family beverage than coffee.
Addison, like Dryden and like Swift, even had mail delivered to his regular coffeehouse. Unlike them, he drank tea. The coffeehouses were not chauvinistic. Alexander Pope drank coffee. Charles de Quincey drank tea. But the type for the tea-shaman was Samuel Johnson. Johnson liked to drink a cup of tea before he rose, and he liked to continue drinking tea throughout the day and evening and into the night, postponing the dreaded, if inevitable, hour of retirement as long as he could.
Johnson hated being alone, especially at night. He said he could only bear solitude if he were reading or writing. Johnson was more like HoTai than LaoTzu, though he dispensed vinegar rather than candies. Still, a widely disparate collection of artists, poets, and intellectuals liked him, or expressed admiration and respect if liking were out of the question for reasons of ideology.
He lived simply and he was generous with what he had. He was said to be able to converse with charm and wit upon any subject, be it books, tea, gardening, social customs, or cats, that a hostess might bring up.
He drank tea and tea and tea. So hear it then, my Rennie dear, Nor hear it with a frown, You cannot make the tea so fast As I can gulp it down. Poesis Methods of brewing tea vary according to culture, the type of tea being brewed, individual taste, and prejudice. Initiates can be extremely fussy, so the art is best learned from them directly. That said, I do want to assert that green tea is best brewed with water that is not quite boiling, and that the first infusion should steep only a couple of minutes.
The second and third infusions, and any thereafter, should steep no more than twenty or thirty seconds, not much longer than it takes to bring the teapot back to the table. Drink it from a bowl. The leaves and any tepid leftover tea will wait patiently in the pot all day, to be revived by fresh hot water. H is tory The English drink tea with milk, Mongolian style.
Perhaps the custom was passed through the Manchu leaders in China at the time of European contact in Canton. Or perhaps the English just came to it by themselves. The way they came to sugar. Through the eighteenth century sugar consumption doubled every ten years.
The curve of English sugar consumption matches closely that of English tea consumption. If we add chocolate consumption in with that ol tea, well more than half of all the sugar consumed is accounted for. Maybe the phenomenon is related to Protestantism, a need for something sweet to lighten the weight of moral severity, or to replace the sweetness of the Mass. Undoubtedly, many karmic links were involved, known and unknown, but the result is clear: the sweetening of tea plundered Africa, as the tea trade would eventually plunder China.
It changed the New World forever, creating a social experiment of such far-reachmg historical potential that its outcome is far from clear. Along the way, sweet tea created the United States. Sugar cane Saccharum officinarum is native to Polynesia. The first plantations were on Barbados, followed by Jamaica, Cuba, and later other islands. The Spanish controlled the area first.
By that time most of the once extensive indigenous Caribbean population had already died out in slavery or been exterminated. The few surviving Caribs the English did find they forcibly shipped to the Miskito coast of Nicaragua. All of the labor for the extremely labor-intensive production of sugar was captured in Africa. Ships left England with firearms, beads, and salt, and traded them for slaves in West Africa.
The surviving captives were sold as slaves, the ship washed and refitted, and then loaded with sugar, molasses, and rum for England. The number of slaves needed to produce sugar the ratio of slaves to product was always ten times that of cotton or tobacco. The cost of a slave was about that of a ton of sugar, and a slave, on average, produced about a tenth of a ton of sugar per year. Though estimates vary on the total number of slaves taken from Africa, three-quarters of them, some fifteen of the total twenty million, were bought for sugar.
Nearly half of that sugar dissolved in tea. History American ships were much less involved in the Triangular Trade, at least until the British got out—slaves bound for southern plantations were often purchased in the Indies. American ships come into the story in a different way. The Navigation Acts prohibited American ships from trading in anything but British goods, except for American goods bound for England. New England traders responded by smuggling. They bought tea from the Dutch.
The English had taxed tea to where the duties amounted to half of its price, in England as well as in the Colonies. The high tax created a huge tea smuggling industry in England, which was hurting the East India Company.
One-third of all the tea entering England was smuggled, and as a consequence the East India Company was left with a tea surplus. The government decided to help them out by letting them sell the tea directly to the Colonies, with only a small fraction of the previous duty-tax. The tax, however, would not be a British tax but a tax on the Colonists, and the tea sales would be an East India monopoly.
The British hoped that by offering the Colonists cheap tea, the Colonists would accept the tax. This, as we know, did not occur. Many Colonists were willing to go along with the new Act—after all, they would get to buy tea at about half the price it would cost in England—but the traders in the northeast were almost unanimously against it, particularly the smugglers such as John Hancock.
The cheap tea, for one, would hurt their profit margin. Sugar and rum might follow. Bostonians wearing blankets, feathers, and face paint threw the tea into the harbor, and similar protests occurred at five other ports. The Crown decided to up the ante by closing the port of Boston with military force, a mistake that cost them their colonies. Times for In idle moments DrinkingTea When bored with poetry Thoughts confused Beating time to songs When the music stops Living in seclusion Enjoying scholarly pastimes Conversing late at night Studying on a sunny day In the bridal chamber Detaining favored guests Playing host to scholars or pretty girls Visiting friends returned from far away In perfect weather When skies are overcast Watching boats glide past on the canal Midst trees and bamboos When flowers bud and birds chatter On hot days by a lotus pond Burning incense in the courtyard After tipsy guests have left When the youngsters have gone out On visits to secluded temples When viewing springs and scenic rocks.
They recognized that Sacrific in cutting flowers to place in the tea room they were involved in ritual sacrifice. The Flower Master knew that with his scissors and his knife, with his wires, his twisting and bending, with his salt and alum and vinegar, that he was the chief torturer, and the executioner. He knew that for a butcher, a pious sense of guilt, or perhaps Debt, was seemly. Thus he washed the leaves with a fine rabbit hair brush.
Thus he tried not to waste. And thus sometimes he would erect a monument. He it was who went off in the springtime with his court musicians to gladden the flowers with soft music. The Ally The head server pours the tea offering into a tiny cup and places it on a tray. Hold the tray at about eye level and approach the altar along the center aisle. Bow to the Buddha, step to the right, and place the offering on the altar.
Bow again, and then make a full prostration, followed by a gassho. Exit along the right aisle. Join the other servers and bring the tea in together; holding the teapots at eye level with both hands. The servers should all bow together after entering the zendo, and then serve the tea. There was one particularly fine and subtle tea cultivated in the Zen temples. When the tea is at last ready, it is said, the disk dissolves, and the True Identity of the tea is revealed—.
Seventy years of Zen— I got nowhere at all I shed my black robe Became a shaggy crank. I have no business with The sacred or profane, Selling tea is all I do— It holds starvation off. In California, the Sterculiaceae is represented by the beautiful Fremontia, or flannel bush, with its spectacular deep golden flowers.
Theobroma cacao occurs as two cultivars: variety criollo, which was the source of the cacao drunk in Mesoamerica, and forastero, a hardier but less tasty variety found in the northern and western Amazon basin. Theobroma cacao only flowers within twenty degrees of latitude north or south of the Equator. Until recently, no one was sure that there were any truly wild populations of Theobroma cacao, but Allen Young has established that truly wild populations exist in the upper Amazon, and Jose Cuatrecasas believes that wild populations exist in Guatemala and in Chiapas among the Lacandon.
In the Amazon, cacao was used mostly, if not entirely, for the pulp. Anthropologist and food historian Sophie Coe, in her fine True History of Chocolate, believes the criollo variety was indigenous to the low plains of southern Mexico and Guatemala, the center of the cacao bean culture. While the seeds of Theobroma cacao remain viable for only a few weeks, the tree could have been spread to Mesoamerica by sea traders around bce as ripe pods, or even as seedlings.
The Plant Theobroma cacao evolved as an understory tree. The flowers are fertilized by tiny midges, and well-manicured plantations have notoriously low yields. Thus the ancient Mesoamerican farmers likely enjoyed much more fruitful yields from their trees than do many modern large-scale plantations.
The large seed pods contain a sweet white pulp, and this was probably the first human interest in the tree. If so, then sweetness was linked to cacao in its earliest use, a subject we will return to with the subsequent post-Conquest practice of sweetening cocoa with sugar. The use of the seeds of the pods developed about three thousand years ago among the Olmec on the Gulf Coast of Mexico.
In their raw form, the seeds are extremely bitter. First the pods have to be carefully cut from the trees in a way that does not damage the cushion. Then the pods are opened and the beans and pulp scraped out. The first stage in processing the pulp is fermentation. Chemical and enzymatic reactions take place that liquefy the pulp and cause the seeds to germinate. The germination of the seeds is essential to create a cocoa flavor. After both fermentations are complete the beans are easily removed from the liquefied pulp and are then dried on mats or in baskets in the sun.
All alone I sing to the one who is my Lord: in this place where the gods command, the flower-chocolate drink is foaming—. I yearn, oh yes! My heart has tasted it. Chocolate goes well with coffee, and with several distilled beverages, such as cognac, or Tennessee whiskey. Chemistry, Chocolate contains xanthine alkaloids, as do coffee and tea. Chocolate contains Pharmacology caffeine, but in small amounts.
A cup of cocoa usually contains about lour or live milligrams of caffeine, about one-twentieth that of a cup of coffee.
But chocolate contains somewhat larger amounts of theobromine, 1,7-dimethylxanthine. While hot chocolate contains only one to eight milligrams of caffeine, it contains forty to eighty milligrams of theobromine. A chocolate bar, at least the good ones, may contain twice to four or five times these quantities of alkaloids.
The exposed nitrogen atom on the theobromine molecule covered by a methyl group in caffeine creates differences in both the level and the nature of the physiological activities of the two sister molecules.
Theobromine is much more potent than caffeine in relaxing bronchial muscles, and thus in relieving spasms, such as asthma. Like caffeine, theobromine is a diuretic. Theobromine is far less potent than caffeine in increasing serum corticosterone levels, perhaps related to its lower solubility.
It has long been suggested that phenethylamine might be responsible for the soothing mood-effects of chocolate. Since chocolate was a favorite of those suffering from love-sickness, it seemed possible that both withdrawal pangs and the phenethylamine in chocolate might be involved with dopamine levels in the brain.
Shulgin investigated this possibility by ingesting large amounts of pure phenethylamine. He found that the body is so effective in breaking down phenethylamine that he felt no effects even from consuming more than a gram and a half of pure phenethylamine, a good spoonful. But science never stands still. Recently, anandanride has been discovered in chocolate. Anandamide is the endogenous ligand, the neurotransmitter in the brain that binds to the THC receptor, which is the receptor to which the tetrahydrocannabinol in marijuana binds.
The fats in chocolate also trigger dopamine-based pleasure circuits. Nalaxone interrupts the sweet and fat cravings of chocoholics. A study at the University of California at Davis found that epicatechin levels in the blood rose exponentially for six hours after subjects consumed semisweet chocolate. We know little about them apart from the colossal heads that they carved in stone. It is from the Olmecs that we received the word cacao.
Europeans ignored the Aztec doctors for several centuries, and poor people in southern Europe who had come to depend upon maize as a staple food often suffered from pellagra, a painful and debilitating disease wholly curable with B vitamins. Coe believes that the nixitamalization of corn provided the energy base that supported the rise and growth of Mesoamerican civilization. Olmec culture and civilization faded from history around bce, for reasons still uncertain.
Sometime around ce the Maya began arriving in the old Olmec territory, coming north from present-day Guatemala. On the Pacific coastal plain of Chiapas, they met descendants of the Olmecs at Izapa. The Classic Maya culture flourished from around to CE. We know that cacao was drunk at least by the aristocracy and that it became an important part of their mythology.
It seems clear that there were a number of different preparations of cacao, with a variety of other plants being used as admixtures, each with distinctive effects. The Maya were traders, and ceramics and obsidian unburied in the Classic Maya city of Balberta in Guatemala show that they traded at least as far north as Teotihuacan.
Classic Maya civilization collapsed around CE. The great cities were abandoned, to be reclaimed, finally, by the forest. Leaving behind the palaces and the rich temples, the marketplaces and the houses, the shops selling musical instruments, the libraries of painted books, the observatories where they charted Venus and predicted eclipses, the corridors and murals, the cacao plantations.
The Collapse was not universal. Large dugout canoes carried cargoes north and south, clear around the Yucatan peninsula down to Honduras.
They established the city of Cacaxtla in Tlaxcala, commanding the trade routes into the Valley of Mexico. TheToltecs expanded their realm of influence as far as and into the Yucatan. The Maya had the trading networks, and they had the recipes for the many differing cacao preparations. As theToltecs declined, a new people, the Mexica, or Aztecs, began to gain power in the Valley of Mexico.
As the Aztecs established their Empire, the Maya were ready with cacao beans to trade with them. Signatures American chocolate is coarse—they skimp on grinding. The Dutch can do about as well as the Belgians, when they put their minds to it. Swiss chocolate is too precise—they confuse it with their watches. French chocolate is pretentious—all frills and package with no substance.
English chocolate is clueless, they have to add fruit and nuts. AWee Bit The Mexica probably arrived in the Valley of Mexico from somewhere to the on the Aztecs north sometime during the thirteenth century.
Other tribes had emerged from the Seven Caves before the Aztecs, including perhaps the Toltecs and the Chichimecs. According to tradition, the Aztecs left Aztlan in the year mi. The Valley, of course, was already occupied by the descendants of the Toltecs along with other immigrant groups.
Even in decadence, the Toltec culture was sophisticated, artistic, and learned. Chapultepec is famous for lost causes. During the U.
Many of these bands intermarried and were assimilated by their adopted cultures. The Mexicas were accepted there as workers and as mercenary warriors. The inhabitants of Culhuacan claimed to be the descendants of the Toltecs.
One story is that the king of Culhuacan had reluctantly given his daughter to be married to a Mexica prince. Culhuacan banished the whole tribe to a couple of islands in the middle of Lake Texcoco, the Lake of the Moon, probably hoping they would starve and disappear. Such did not occur.
A dissident faction settled on a neighboring island, and named their A. For several generations the Mexica lived quietly, building up their population by welcoming refugees from other parts of the Valley.
The Mexica concentrated in developing crafts and trading more than agriculture, and it was the various foreign peoples the Mexica welcomed to their island that provided many of these skills. The jewelers and lapidary artists came from Xochimilco. An important guild, the manuscript painters, were descendants of a Mixtecan tribe, the Tlailotlaca.
But most important for our story were the pochteca, the long-distance merchants. Sahagun dates their arrival in Tenochtitlan at around The pochteca were related ethnically to peoples on the Gulf Coast: the Chontal Maya, and perhaps to the Olmecs—the same traders who had served the Toltecs and Teotihuacan at Cacaxtla.
Such as drinking chocolate. The pochteca were considered honorary warriors, and they probably exaggerated the dangers of their long-distance trading journeys to maintain that image. They kept to themselves and tried to maintain a low profile. Tenochtitlan was a city of craftsmen, and they were dependent on imports. The whole wealth of the city was based on the flow of raw materials across the causeways: cacao, feathers, precious stones, gold, cotton—any item of exotic beauty that could add to the prestige of the city—as well as foodstuffs.
And prestige was of paramount importance. We can say that ah governments are in the business of enchantment, to keep the sacrificial victims from rising up and overthrowing those who sacrifice and eat them. Along with terror, hegemony depends upon myth and sorcery. Tenochtitlan thus deserves our study. In , during the reign of King Itzcoatl, the Mexica of Tenochtitlan faced a crisis.
King Maxtla of Azcapotzalco, sensing the ambition of the Mexica, had doubled their tribute. The Mexica had responded by developing floating gardens to be able to raise enough food to pay off Azcapotzalco, but Maxtla was still not satisfied.
A philosopher named Tlacaelel spoke and aroused the Mexica to resistance. The Mexica enlisted allies from other tribes and cities that had grudges against Azcapotzalco, and the war against the Tecpanecs was successful. With the defeat of the Tecpanecs, Tlacaelel directed three important changes in Mexica society, and thereby created the Aztec state.
This system gave commoners a means of upward mobility, measured by the number of captives a soldier had brought back to the city. Second, Tlacaelel expropriated Tecpanec lands and divided them between the king, the nobility, the new warrior class, and the calpullis, the traditional kin-based guilds that functioned as the basic governing units of the various quarters and sections of the city.
Mexico and beyond: west to the territory of theTarascans, east to the Gulf Coast except for Tlaxcala , and south to Oaxaca. Lastly, and certainly an act of magic,Tlacaelel burned the books and scrolls that he could find in order to write a new history In the new history Huitzilopochtli, the god of war, was made a supreme deity, elevated to the rank of the Fifth Sun, the present age.
Many ascribe to Tlacaelel the Aztec equation of blood and sun: that the energy of the human heart and the energy of the sun were one, and that this energy could be transferred through sacrifice. It was certainly under Tlacaelel s tenure that the sacrifice of prisoners of war began in earnest.
And it was Tlacaelels idea to maintain a state of constant warfare with several distant cities—not too distant, but not so near as to be kinfolk—to procure sacrificial victims. Tlacaelel restructured the priesthood. The Maya sacrificed captives, often after torturing them, and war captives were tortured in many places in North America. Among the Maya, human sacrifice is associated with kingship, especially with the ascension of a new king. But nowhere else did human sacrifice attain the pervasive scale that it did inTenochtitlan.
Maya sacrifice was always accompanied with shamanic blood-letting. A queen would pierce her tongue diagonally with a stingray spine, and then pull a length of twisted string through the hole, allowing the blood to flow down the string. A king did the same with his penis.
The blood was collected on paper and burned. The Visionary Serpent emerged from the smoke, and the visions that came from his mouth were recorded and interpreted.
The Aztecs practiced bloodletting, generally by piercing earlobes, but they seem not to have practiced the visionary divination from burning blood. In fact, there seems to have been some fear of the Serpent. If we distinguish shamanism from priestcraft, shamanism being direct intercourse with spiritual energies through some form of trance, then shamanism in Aztec sacrifice is most notable by its absence.
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