Health changes are hard, especially with our busy daily lives, but there is one easy switch you can make to improve your day-to-day energy levels and overall health and well-being. Drinking healthier coffee is one of the easiest things you can do to improve your wellness, performance and longevity.
Today’s blog post goes out to all you coffee drinkers! Especially those who love their morning cup, but often experience digestive upset or other issues with widely manufactured coffee brands. We’ll explore the benefits of a healthier coffee option, Purity Coffee, and what it can do for your health.
|| How is Purity Coffee different?
Purity Coffee is the only coffee company in the world that is completely focused on maximizing health benefits. Purity tests their coffee to ensure that it is always free of mold, mycotoxins, and pesticide free. They begin with an organic green coffee bean sourced from only defect-free, speciality-grade beans that are then roasted to achieve maximum health benefits. Their roasting and processing process ensures that beans are more antioxidant rich than other leading brands of coffee and delivered fresh by being shipped within 48 hours of roasting.
Coffee is one of the healthiest foods in the Western diet. It’s an established scientific fact, and there are mountains of proof. Over 19,000 studies have been done to measure coffee’s health benefits, and their results have overwhelmingly pointed to coffee’s healing properties. Coffee has been shown to decrease risk of diabetes, heart disease, liver disease, Alzheimer’s, and multiple cancers. And it doesn’t just help a little bit. Research has shown that 3-5 cups of coffee per day has an astonishing array of health benefits. Much of these benefits are thanks to antioxidants called chlorogenic acids, or CGAs. These compounds fight the inflammation that can lead to heart disease, type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and all kinds of other life-threatening conditions.
Many commercial coffee producers eliminate the toxins and mold that develops on coffee by roasting them away. However, according to Purity’s scientists, toxins don’t just disappear, they merely change their form. Additionally, cancer-causing compounds called Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (or PAHs) develop as a result of smoking or over-roasting coffee beans. Through extensive lab testing, Purity uses a unique roasting protocol to retain maximum antioxidants in coffee beans while completely avoiding PAH development and reducing the amount of Acrylamide (which occurs as result of under-roasting).
The last area for ensuring coffee is as healthy as it can be lies in its storage, packaging, and delivery. All foodstuffs are capable of going stale or even rancid, and coffee is no exception. However, coffee can often languish on warehouse and even supermarket shelves for months, losing its healthful potency and becoming more likely to cause digestive discomfort. Purity’s founders made a commitment to freshness, only storing green beans for 15 months, roasting only according to the number of orders received, and shipping the roasted beans to the customer within 48 hours of roasting in bags flushed with nitrogen.
Purity coffee takes care from each step of your coffee’s journey to ensure that it is a fresh as it can be and will help you maximize your health and wellness.
|| So, what is the TRUTH about coffee?
Drinking coffee is one of the healthiest things you can do to protect yourself against major diseases, increase physical performance, enhance brain function and contribute to longevity. With such astounding health benefits, coffee could be considered a natural super food.
But not all coffees are created equal…
Despite the wide range of general health benefits, poor production practices can compromise the health attributes of coffee at nearly every step in the process. Many adverse effects and health risks have to do with toxins, which do not appear in the natural green coffee bean itself, but in the growing, processing, storage and shipping of coffee. These toxins include: Ochratoxin A, Acrylamide and Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs), which appear to result from unchecked production and roasting practices. Other adverse effects have to do with caffeine and particular acids found in coffee.
|| Toxins that Can Be Found in Coffee
Ochratoxin A is a natural poison that is highly toxic to the kidneys. It is produced by a few types of molds found on raw, or “green”, coffee beans, often caused by collecting beans from decomposing fruits, or by some unhealthy fermentation processes.
Acrylamide is a naturally occurring chemical, found in a wide range of cooked foods such as French fries, breads, cookies, cereals and coffee, which is known to cause cancer in animals. The coffee roasting process can create, change and destroy acrylamide, all in the same roast batch, depending on several variables.
Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAHs) are burned compounds that can be present in any food that is roasted. High temperature roasting processes can form undesirable PAHs.
Pesticides may be present, since coffee is known to be heavily chemically treated during cultivation. Of the coffees worldwide, 97% are treated with pesticides and other chemicals, while only 3% of the coffees available today are organic. Some farmers use low-toxicity pesticides responsibly, but many do not, and it is quite difficult to monitor. Some state that the roasting process destroys pesticides, but research suggests that the chemicals actually penetrate the green bean, and that roasting fails to eradicate most of them.
|| Other Adverse Effects
Caffeine (from coffee or any other source) can increase nervousness, anxiety, jitters and restlessness. It can release the stress hormone cortisol, which can increase your blood pressure, heart rate and exacerbate anxiety.
Acids in coffee can irritate the stomach and lining of the small intestine, particularly in people suffering from digestive issues such as ulcers, IBS, and Crohn’s disease. For some, the acidity in coffee beans can cause acid reflux or heartburn.
|| Health Benefits of Coffee
- Coffee is possibly the richest source of antioxidants in the western diet (and PURITY is the richest source of antioxidants out of all coffees).
- Coffee helps many lose weight, boosting metabolic rates by 3 -11%. Athletes who took in caffeine pre-exercise burned 15% more calories for three hours post-exercise than those who didn’t.
- Coffee dramatically enhances performance in high intensity exercise, 11-12%, on average. Cyclists completed 15% to 23% more work during the caffeine trial than the other two trials.
- Extensive research shows that coffee improves various aspects of brain function, including memory, mood, vigilance, energy levels, reaction times and overall cognitive function.
- Coffee decreases risk of depression (Koenen 2011).
