As you all know, I’m a huge proponent of caffeine. Since drinking coffee seems to be the best delivery method for this wonderful substance, I’ve been doing some homework to try and determine how to get the most out of my coffee.
First, take a look at the following articles to really bone up on the benefits of drinking coffee:
Poliquin’s tip on coffee for fat-loss
The Globe and Mail’s health benefits of coffee
Top 10 Benefits of Coffee to Health, Performance and Body Composition
Linus Pauling Institute Coffee Study
Secondly, as the Globe and Mail points out, it is important to first assess your current state of health before ramping up caffeine intake. Coffee intake should be limited if:
- You have heartburn or reflux disease (GERD)
- You’re pregnant (increased risk of miscarriage).
- You have low bone density or osteoporosis (caffeine can diminish calcium in bones, if your diet is lacking the mineral).
- You already have high blood pressure or insomnia.
Finally, it is only logical to me that drinking high-quality coffee will provide more benefits than a low-grade cup.
Most studies that correlate coffee to fat-loss use green coffee extract (not a regular cup of coffee) as the test substance. These studies have found that there is indeed a correlation. Green coffee bean extract has two useful acids: chlorogenic acid and caffeic acid. Chlorogenic acid seems to be the compound responsible for most health benefits of coffee, due to its antioxidant properties. It helps to decrease free radicals, which are very harmful to cell membranes, and has shown a high potential for boosting metabolism (fat-loss). Chlorogenic acid can also inhibit the release of sugar into the blood.
The issue is that green coffee bean extract comes from unroasted coffee beans, unlike the coffee that we drink. This means that green coffee extract has less caffeine, but more of the compounds that are beneficial to your health. Roasting coffee beans (ie, all the coffee we drink) causes them to lose a lot of their chlorogenic acid. It’s also true that the quality of roasted coffee beans diminishes very quickly after roasting- the beans continue to emit CO2 for roughly a week after roasting. This primarily affects the taste of coffee (bitter coffee is stale coffee), but it would also reason to think that stale coffee beans would have less of an impact on health as well.
With all of this in mind, it only makes sense to me to try and consume the highest-possible quality coffee. This will always be very difficult to do when out at restaurants or even coffee shops, but here are some rules of thumb to high-quality home brewing:
- Choose Arabica coffee beans; these are the highest quality coffee beans. Robusta beans can contain more caffeine, but are of a lower quality.
- Consume coffee within 1 week of roasting
- Consume coffee within 3 hours of grinding
- Consume coffee within 15 minutes of brewing
This means no buying packaged, pre-ground coffee, nor buying large bulk containers of beans. This also means that you’ll need a coffee grinder. It makes the process of coffee drinking a bit more intense, but since I’ve made the change, it’s really no more cumbersome than before- I just have to make a trip to the coffee shop once a week to buy freshly-roasted beans. Oh, and the coffee is much better. Significantly better.
To conclude, coffee is a great substance and (health-permitting) should be enjoyed by everyone- especially by those of us interested in fat-loss.
For more info, you know how to reach me!
-DW
