The Ups and Downs of Coffee

Coffee image

We now consume over 400 Billion cups of coffee a year, because most of us like a nice cup of coffee first thing in the morning to give us a grip on reality and it is now the second biggest export just behind oil. In the health world, coffee and more specifically caffeine has become quite the controversial subject as to whether it’s beneficial or destructive. This page is here to help clear up some of these theories to give you a better perspective and understanding so you can take control of your coffee intake or eliminate it from your diet completely. So let’s firstly go through some of the health benefits of drinking coffee:

Is coffee an athlete's friend?
Is coffee an athlete’s friend?
  • Coffee for most people is the number 1 source of antioxidants for their body
  • A cup of coffee or a shot of espresso after a big meal can help to stimulate your digestive system, allowing a better performance for the digestion of the meal
  • If you do your routine exercise first thing in the morning then drinking a cup of coffee just before your workout can have benefits by stimulating your muscles and delaying muscle fatigue, allowing you to take your workout that extra bit further
  • Coffee can help your brain to regenerate neurons and recycle brain tissue
  • Coffee can help lower your risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease
  • The caffeine in coffee can help to rejuvenate your muscle tissue
  • Drinking coffee can increase your metabolism by up to 20%
  • Coffee can help to reduce post workout muscle soreness
  • Caffeine found in coffee can help to increase your attention and alertness and decease fatigue
  • Caffeine decreases your risk of cardiovascular disease
  • Caffeine lowers your risk of developing diabetes

Now all these benefits sound wonderful, however these benefits come with some great down sides:

  • Firstly the coffee bean is the most heavily sprayed plant in the world for pesticides
  • Coffee is highly acidic and in large doses can cause ‘metabolic acidosis’ which basically means a catastrophe has happened to the body, when the body builds up too much acid it begins to fall apart
  • Caffeine activates adrenaline release in the blood which can have bad side effects to your adrenal function
  • Caffeine reduces your control over fine motor movements
  • Drinking coffee or caffeinated beverages can severely stress out your heart and can lead to heart attacks
  • The energy your getting from your cup of coffee is actually your body producing stress hormones giving you the impression that you have instant energy
  • Caffeine decreases insulin sensitivity so your insulin response struggles to lower your blood sugar appropriately
  • Coffee contains diterpenes which contribute to higher LDL cholesterol
  • Coffee disrupts your gut flora balance causing discomfort , indigestion and heart burn
  • Coffee contains high amounts of caffeine which is the world most popular drug and just like all drugs it is highly addictive and many people now suffer from dependencies to coffee and caffeine
  • Because coffee is addictive, the body relies on it for energy or ‘stress energy’
  • Coffee just like all other drugs has a big affect on your serotonin levels in the brain and when deprived of it, it can cause mood swings, energy slumps and loss of sleep
  • Coffee causes elevated urination of important minerals such as: Calcium, magnesium and potassium
  • Coffee puts your liver through absolute hell which interferes with detoxification processes
  • Caffeine raises blood pressure
  • Coffee can damage your artery walls
  • Caffeine constricts blood vessels leading to the heart
  • Caffeine in coffee increases anxiety and worries
  • Coffee can drive your body to exhaustion
  • If you drink coffee when you are pregnant, just two cups a day is enough to affect foetal heart  development, reducing your child’s heart function over the course of their life span
Cup of coffee
Could coffee be doing more harm than good?

I could give you a 100 more reasons to not drink coffee but I think I have made my point here and with all these facts considered it may sound to you that if you just have decaffeinated coffee it would solve half the problems on this list, however, decaffeinated coffee is highly filtered and as a consequence filters out all of the possible health benefits that we first mentioned. If you drink decaffeinated coffee you are just causing yourself damage for no reason whatsoever. Our suggestion to you is to just give your body a nice big break from caffeine in all of its forms, we recommend between 2 weeks to a month being free of caffeine. After this period is over you will be running on real energy for the first time in a long time and your body will thank you. If you do decide to continue drinking coffee after this period then have a look at the tips below to help keep your coffee more on the health side:

  • Firstly, the month of detox is important for you as you may find that you really do feel much better without it
  • If you do feel much better without coffee and wish to continue without coffee in your diet then try replacing it with something healthier, we recommend green tea, as it’s packed full of antioxidants and phytonutrients to help your liver to process the very small amounts of caffeine found in green tea. Some other healthy hot drinks are Tusli tea and herbal teas.
  • If you wish to keep coffee in your lifestyle make sure your coffee is made by yourself, get the coffee beans as unprocessed (straight from the ground) as possible also making sure they are organic and have not been sprayed with dangerous chemicals
  • Cut down your consumption of coffee to 1 cup a day and never drink coffee after exercise
  • Make sure when filtering your coffee that you use non-bleached filters, the white filters are filled with dangerous by products such as chlorine and dioxin
  • Never use plastic cups or Styrofoam cups as they will also leak harmful chemicals into your blood stream
  • As coffee is highly acidic we recommend making sure you have plenty of fresh vegetables in your diet to help alkalize the acid that may be forming
  • Lastly, do not give any form of caffeine to your children as their bodies are not very effective at detoxing the substance and it can stay in their system for dangerous amounts of time

We hope this article has been of some good use for your information and you can now hopefully make your own mind up as to whether coffee is for you or not. Thanks for reading!

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