According to a study conducted by researchers at the university's school of sport and exercise sciences, it was found that by introducing caffeine into sports drinks it increased the absorption rate of carbohydrates by 26 percent.

A group of eight cyclists took part in three two-hour exercise sessions, and for each of the three trials, the cyclists took one of three different sports drinks, glucose, glucose mixed with caffeine, and water.

The researchers found that caffeine increased the amount of carbohydrates absorbed from the sports drink.

Dr. Asker Jeukendrup, the director of the University's Human Performance Laboratory, says if you can get more energy from your drink, it means you are using less energy from your body stores.

Jeukendrup says the results do not prove that caffeine is a performance-enhancing substance, but rather how caffeine affects the body's carbohydrates.

Jeukendrup says they did not measure performance, and this is just a way to increase the availability of carbohydrates. He says that there are other ways of increasing the availability of carbohydrates, and the simplest way would be to just eat more carbohydrates.

However, Jeukendrup does plan to include it in future caffeine studies by controlling the test subjects' exercise, diet, temperature and motivation to perform.

Caffeine, an ingredient in coffee and cola, was removed from the World Anti-Doping Agency list of banned substances in January 2004. WADA, however, continues to monitor the use of caffeine.

The test subjects in the Birmingham study were given a high dosage of caffeine, equivalent to drinking four cups of coffee an hour.

In future studies, less caffeine will be used in the experiments.

He added: "This was a really surprising result. We expected to find that Scots have higher rates of heart disease just because they tend to be less wealthy and tend to have less healthy lifestyles than their English neighbours.

"People choosing a healthy lifestyle for themselves, and government tackling poverty, are still the best ways to reduce heart disease, but it seems that there may be something else contributing to Scotland's terrible record with this disease. We need to do more work to find out what that 'X-factor' might be.

"This was a powerful study because, unlike other previous work, it looked at a wide variety of the factors which can put someone at risk of heart disease “ everything from their employment status, to their lifestyle, to the chemistry of their blood and their mental health. It was also an important study because it used data from men and women from the whole of Scotland and England, rather than from just one or two towns or cities, or just one sex. The study used data from the Scottish Health Survey, and the Health Survey for England. It focused on people aged 45-74 years old because it is at these ages that the biggest differences between the two countries in death rates for heart disease usually occur."

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