December 8, 2018

Podcast from:   https://bengreenfieldfitness.com/podcast/nutrition-podcasts/healthiest-coffee/

[0:00:00] Intro

[0:00:56] Podcast Sponsors

[0:03:39] A Lot About Coffee

[0:05:40] The Top Recently Researched Benefits of Coffee

[0:09:26] Reasons Coffee May Contribute to A Longer Lifespan

[0:15:44] When to Be Careful with Your Coffee Intake

[0:18:11] How the Health Benefits of Coffee Are Compromised Through Packaging and Processing

[0:19:19] 5 Problems to Watch Out For

[0:24:16] Podcast Sponsors

[0:27:00] What We Tested for In Each of The Coffees We Tested

[0:36:23] The Results of Our Comprehensive Coffee Test

[0:40:47] How to Do A Coffee Enema

[0:48:34] Closing the Podcast

[0:49:34] End of Podcast

Ben:  I have a master's degree in physiology, biomechanics, and human nutrition. I've spent the past two decades competing in some of the most masochistic events on the planet from SEALFit Kokoro, Spartan Agoge, and the world's toughest mudder, the 13 Ironman triathlons, brutal bow hunts, adventure races, spearfishing, plant foraging, free diving, bodybuilding and beyond. I combine this intense time in the trenches with a blend of ancestral wisdom and modern science, search the globe for the world's top experts and performance, fat loss, recovery, gut hormones, brain, beauty, and brawn to deliver you this podcast. Everything you need to know to live an adventurous, joyful, and fulfilling life. My name is Ben Greenfield. Enjoy the ride.

Hey, it's Ben Greenfield, in case you didn't know that based on the introduction. That might be slightly redundant, but I'm going to roll with it. I want to tell you, before we jump into today's show, about the brand new Kion Daily Life Bundle I've put together. I just thought about the things that I use every day from my own company that aren't super-duper fringe like cocktail ingredients type of compounds, even though we have a lot of those but just like super simple stuff that makes sense. So, what I did was I put together a bundle of, A, my clean food energy bar with cacao nibs and coconut and almond and organic honey.

I put together my Kion Lean on top of that, the one that I simply take any time before I eat carbohydrates. It's very simple. It's just bitter melon extract and a little rock lotus for your liver, Kion Aminos, which I use for recovery and for anabolism, and then Kion Coffee. That's it. You make it up as black Kion Coffee, and then you eat an energy bar, one of these clean energy bars along with it. I mean, that can be brekkie right there or lunch or dinner. I have, too. I freeze them, sprinkled on top, a halo top ice cream. Pick your poison. So, it's the Kion Daily Life Bundle. You go to getkion.com. It's marked down tremendously when you buy it as a bundle. You just save almost 20 bucks, I believe. So, you go to getkion.com, getK-I-O-N.com. And the one you want to look for that I just told you about is the Daily Life Bundle.

This podcast is also brought to you by the well-kept secret, they call it, but it's not a secret if I'm talking about it on a podcast. So, I don't understand that. But they call it a well-kept secret for men hunting down sexual performance, and it's called GAINSwave. What you do is you go into one of these clinics. They have clinics all over the U.S. They take out this little wand. It produces these patented sound waves. They kind of, usually a doctor or a nurse, not usually, always a doctor or a nurse or a medical professional wearing a white coat, they treat you with this thing using sound waves to increase blood flow to your nether regions, and it gives you, guys out there, firmer, more resilient erections that encourages the growth of new blood vessels that increase the delivery of oxygen and nutrients to your nether regions, and it works. I've done it a bunch.

You can go in like every month to every two months, and it makes you operate with extreme–I don't know if precision and efficiency is the right word. Make sure orgasm is mind-blowing, I can tell you that, and you get very, very hard. I can tell you that, too. So, guys, if you want to try this out, it works on women too by the way, but you just go to gainswave.com/ben. You go to gainswave.com/ben. If you get six treatments, they'll throw in one free treatment on the house. You get 12 treatments, they'll throw in the 13^th for free. That easy.

I hope you like coffee because you're about to hear a lot about coffee in today's show, not only the top health benefits of coffee based on the most recent research that's very interesting I think even if you already know that coffee is safe, good for stating off Alzheimer's. There's a lot more to it that I want to delve into in today's solosode. In addition, embarrassingly, I actually get a lot of questions about this whole coffee enema piece. And so, I will fill you in on that, why I do it, and how it's done because that is something I do on a weekly basis. And then finally, and I think perhaps most importantly or at least most interestingly, we actually officially got the results in after using three independent labs from around the globe to analyze over 100 different coffees, 46 different brands of coffees, many of which you're no doubt familiar with. And I'm going to reveal the official results of that testing and what we found when it comes to everything from ochratoxin, to pesticides, to acidity, to flavor, to acrylamide, to chlorogenic acid, to everything that we actually discovered based on a lot of the world's leading coffee. So, wait with bated breath and a cup of joe or orange mocha Frappuccino or whatever is that you like to drink, and we're going to delve in.

I will put all of the show notes for today's podcast over at BenGreenfeldFitness.com/coffeepod, as in coffee podcast. That's BenGreenfieldFitness.com/coffeepod. And over there, I will link to the lab results that I'll talk about, some of the research on coffee, some of my previous podcasts on coffee because I do have some very interesting previous podcasts on coffee, and even my groundbreaking article on how to give yourself a coffee enema, if that's your thing.

So, let's begin with what they've found recently about coffee because the New York Times reported just several weeks ago at the time of this recording that coffee drinkers may live longer. So, you may be familiar already that studies have linked in the past coffee to a lower risk of death. But this particular article was very interesting. They began with reporting on the findings of a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, which found that drinking coffee is associated with a longer lifespan and a lower risk of death from all causes but especially from cardiovascular disease and cancer. Two of the top five causes of death.

In that study, they looked at nearly 500,000 men and women, and they looked at their coffee consumption, whether or not they had genetic variants that affect caffeine metabolism because some people are slow coffee metabolizers, some people are fast coffee metabolizers, and what they found was that people who drink at least a cup of coffee a day have a 6% lower risk of death than those who drink less than a cup of coffee a day. People who consumed eight or more cups a day–and these were cups. These probably weren't giant ass mugs, but they were cups. They probably also weren't grande Starbucks, but they were cups of just basic black coffee. These folks had a 14% lower risk.

Now, this was an observational study. So, the caveat that should usually be applied to nutritional research applies in this case. It doesn't prove that coffee consumption actually causes a lower risk of death, but it does show an association between coffee consumption and a longer lifespan. One could argue that anyone who can actually afford to drink eight cups of coffee per day may simply have access to more money to take better care of their health. You could certainly throw that argument in there. But we do know that there's some kind of relationship here between caffeine or coffee metabolism and its overall effect on longevity or risk of mortality.

Now, in 2017, just last year, the time of this recording, there was another study in which they looked at it at a very ethnically diverse group of participants. They used Hawaii and L.A. for this study. And in that study, they also reported a link between daily coffee intake and reduced risk of death from all causes. So, this would include heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes, kidney disease, respiratory disease compared with folks who never or only rarely drink coffee. What was found in that study was people who drink one cup a day have a 12% lower risk of death, people who drink three cups a day have an 18% lower risk of death. And this was quite interesting because they found that the results were the same between the caffeinated and the decaffeinated coffee consuming groups, which means that there's a lot more that coffee is doing for you in terms of the tannins and the antioxidants than just the caffeine itself.

Then there was another study in 2014, and this was a comprehensive review and a meta-analysis of 20 other previously published studies on coffee. And in that comprehensive review, they also found that coffee consumption is associated with a reduced overall risk of mortality. So, in general, we know based on a robust body of research, get it robust, that drinking coffee appears to confer longer life.

So, let's take a look at some of the actual reasons this could be, like what coffee actually does to certain sectors of your body, and why it would be that coffee would help in this case. So, first of all, when it comes to cardiovascular health, in a meta-analysis of 36 studies, what was found in research was that there is a significant association between coffee consumption and reduced risk of cardiovascular disease. The lowest risk of cardiovascular disease is found in people who drink three to five cups a day of coffee. And heavy coffee consumption surprisingly isn't actually associated, even though you'd think you'd have jitters and heart palpitations, with an elevated risk of cardiovascular disease.

A particularly coffee consumption may help stroke. Regular coffee drinkers of at least a cup a day have been found to have a 20% lower risk for stroke compared to people who drink coffee irregularly or seldomly. We also know that coffee protects against many individual risk factors for cardiovascular disease. So, it's linked to higher HDL. It's linked to lower LDL. I know that lower LDL is not necessarily something that directly correlates to cardiovascular disease but it is necessary for many elements of cardiovascular disease to be present. So, the fact that coffee lowers LDL does indicate its importance in reducing the risk for cardiovascular disease. We also see reduced risk of metabolic syndrome and reduced risk of type 2 diabetes with regular consumption of coffee.

So part of this might be because coffee has a very high amount of what are called polyphenols in it. And those act as antioxidants. We know that there are other components in coffee that can actually trigger your own endogenous production of antioxidants via what is called antioxidant gene expression. And we know that coffee has anti-inflammatory. So, because a lot of cardiovascular diseases and chronic diseases, in general, are triggered by inflammation and by oxidative damage, that's probably one of the reasons that coffee is having this type of effects on cardiovascular disease.

Next, there's cancer. This one we could go super deep on, but suffice it to say, more than thousand studies have looked at the link between coffee and cancer prevention. Now, very similarly to the way that the polyphenols in coffee cause it to be heart healthy and cardioprotective, coffee also contains flavonoids, it contains lignans, it contains more of these polyphenols. All of these have been shown to inhibit metastasis, and to regulate genes that are involved in DNA repair, and to stop some of the cellular damage that could actually result in increased risk of cancer.

So some of the primary cancers that coffee has really been studied to produce at a significantly lower risk of, one would be breast, especially when it comes to caffeinated coffee. Caffeinated coffee imparts a profound decrease in the risk of breast cancer. Prostate cancer, it's associated with a reduced risk of prostate cancer in one meta-analysis of over 13 different studies. Liver, very important for the liver, both drinking coffee, as well as coffee enemas. That's one of the reasons that I do coffee enemas. They significantly reduce my liver enzymes and enhance my bioproduction. But a study in 2005 showed that folks who consume coffee daily, men or women, have a lower risk of what's called hepatocellular carcinoma, and that's a form of liver disease. And researchers found that just one cup a day could cut that risk by about 20%. And then there's colorectal cancer. Colorectal cancer, regular coffee consumption, you get about 26% lower odd of developing colorectal cancer. So, a lot of effects on cancer.

Next would be Parkinson's disease. Particularly, caffeinated coffee has been associated with a significantly reduced risk of Parkinson's disease. We're talking about up to 60%. So, this is very significant. Part of that could be because coffee increases your gut motility, and that could actually create an environment in which much of the intestinal immune system is able to resist Parkinson's disease. So, that's the proposed mechanism of action in these studies by the researchers.

Next, there's depression. So, they have one longitudinal study that they did of more than 50,000 women and they found that depression risk decreases with coffee consumption, a particularly caffeinated coffee consumption. Decaf coffee actually isn't associated with any decrease in the risk of depression, although that hasn't been as heavily studied as caffeinated coffee. And the greatest decrease in the risk of depression was seen in women who drank more than four cups of coffee per day.

Now, the research goes on and on and on. And if you were to, for example, go to the shownotes over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com/coffeepod, over there, I will put a link to an article that I have that goes into the health benefits of coffee in even more detail. But to wrap up this section on why I'm a fan of coffee, I want to quote a guy who I had on my show. We talked about the fact that the philosopher Voltaire drank more than 60 cups of coffee per day. Again, I don't know how big his cups were. They might have been thimblefuls. But either way, Dr. Sanjiv Chopra, Deepak Chopra's brother, he's a liver specialist, he's a best-selling author, he's the former dean of faculty at Harvard Medical School.

And here's what he has to say about coffee and health. He says, “Coffee is really good for you. In fact, coffee actually may be the healthiest beverage you can drink. People usually limit the amount of coffee they drink and often decide that they shouldn't have that extra cup of coffee they're craving. The evidence that they are misinformed is overwhelming and more evidence is being reported practically every day. I've become a true advocate of the health benefits of coffee.” You can go listen to my podcast with this guy because we talked about why he's such a fan of coffee for over an hour in that show. And I'll link to it as a good accompaniment to today's show.

But suffice it to say, coffee is pretty dang healthy stuff. Now, of course, there are a few situations in which you'd want to be careful. One is if you are addicted to coffee–and I actually switched to decaf coffee quite regularly, or I just have a few days. Actually, the time of this recording ironically Enough, I've gone for–it's been about eight days since I've had a cup of coffee and I've just been drinking green tea, and also this cacao nib tea that I get off of Amazon just to make sure that I'm not becoming addicted to or dependent upon coffee because many folks do have what's called hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis dysfunction, HPA axis dysfunction. And if you have that, doing high amounts of any type of energy compound that you become dependent upon, it might not be a good idea for you until you've actually taken care of that HPA axis dysfunction.

Next would be if you're a slow caffeine metabolizer. I've talked about the CYP1 variant before in the solosodes that I did last month on personalized nutrition. I talked quite a bit about genes and how they dictate food choices and how they also dictate supplement choices and caffeine choices. So, about 50% of the population, a little bit less than that, that has a variant in the gene CYP1A and that leads to slow caffeine metabolism. You can go to 23andMe, for example. Get a genetic testing. You could find that out.

So if you're a slow metabolizer, many times slow metabolizers have coffee afternoon. Afternoon, in the middle of the day, they find that they have difficulty sleeping and reduced deep sleep levels. In addition, if you're a slow metabolizer, this means that the recommendations to drink multiple cups of coffee a day decrease significantly for you. And you're one of those people who would probably do best, kind of nursing or sipping a mug of coffee, one throughout the morning and then switching to decaf after that. So, slow caffeine metabolizers.

Interestingly, a lot of times, slow caffeine metabolizers, they don't have a taste for coffee. They don't like it as much. So, it's interesting. If you fall under that category, you probably just don't need as much coffee. And then of course if you're pregnant, you want to be careful because we know high levels of coffee consumption, particularly caffeinated coffee, seems to increase risk for preterm births and stillbirths. So, if you're pregnant, I would also be careful with coffee along with your choice of what type of coffee you actually drink, which I will get to in a little bit on this show. So, ultimately, that is the skinny on the health benefits of coffee.

So, if you are going to be drinking coffee, you do need to proceed with caution. Coffee, as you've just learned, has amazing health and wellness properties. But many coffee companies, and you'd be surprised at the number of even “healthy” coffee companies included, they often sacrifice health benefits for profit or for poor production practices. So, substandard processes can destroy many of the health benefits of coffee that you've just learned about but also introduce harmful compounds that can cause upset stomach or jitters or risk for chronic disease or much worse.

So, most coffee companies focus on low costs. They focus on speed, they focus on convenience, they focus on high-volume production and the bottom line. Other companies will focus only on taste but not necessarily on health properties. And in most cases, the actual health benefits, designing a coffee specifically for health is not even on the radar screen for the vast majority of coffee companies. And I would estimate about more than 99% of coffees worldwide have one of the following problems.

I've got five that I would say that you need to be very careful with. Number one would be that most coffee cherries, and you're probably aware of this, they're doused with chemicals and pesticides. It's a notoriously heavily sprayed crop. So, in pursuit of higher profits, coffee buyers will often buy beans from places with low environmental regulations and they'll use as many chemical pesticides as necessary to kill off insects so they increase their crop production.

Problem number two is that even if you're getting a coffee organic–and remember, only 3% of the coffee that you can get in the world is actually truly organic. But even these organic coffees often use substandard beans. So, the organic beans aren't soaked in pesticides per se, but unfortunately, many organic coffees don't get the proper nutrients and that can result in defective beans, poor taste, low-quality beans and insect damage, which can affect also crop sustainability.

Next is that coffee beans often develop mold during their journey from the coffee tree to your morning cup of joe. So, this would include microorganisms, mycotoxins, and these occur for a multitude of reasons; adverse climate conditions, poor practices in the field, harvesting, processing, transportation or storage of the coffee cherry itself. But ultimately, it's very rare not to find mold even if it wasn't in the original crop. It's moldy by the time it gets to you. Next is that the actual roasting process can tend to create some big issues. Roasters often uncompensate for some of the defects in coffee by burning or charring the coffee beans. And this is so common that many folks have come to expect their coffee to have a burnt taste. That's usually a sign actually. If your coffee tastes burnt, it's usually a sign there are carcinogens in the coffee, same thing if your steak tastes burnt, right? Dark roasting burns away most of the healthy antioxidants that are present in the green coffee beans, and that greatly reduces the health benefits of the coffee.

And then finally, the last thing to think about is the vast majority of coffee sitting on grocery store shelves or coffee shop shelves. It's stale, and in many cases, rancid. And some coffees will sit on retail store shelves in suboptimal packaging for as long as six months to a year before you actually purchase it, and who knows how long it's actually sitting in someone's house prior to that point.

So, these are a lot of things that you need to think about when it comes to coffee. So, what I have for you in today's show is I want to tell you what I found when I worked with three different independent labs from around the globe to analyze over 100 different coffees representing 46 different brands. So, we tested for everything, and I'm going to get into it in just a second. I will link to all of these results in the shownotes, which you can get over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com/coffeepod. That's BenGreenfieldFitness.com/coffeepod.

So this all started, this approach to testing all started with a few ideas that I wanted to confirm and clarify and explore. I wanted to review the scientific experiments and studies about coffee and health and organize those and categorize those. And I'll link to how I did that in the shownotes, look into the claims that other coffee companies are making about coffee and the health of their coffee, study the health properties of everyday coffees that are available for purchase from Amazon and Whole Foods and a lot of these health stores that we saw often are getting our coffees from, and even directly from brand websites and in supermarkets. So, we had a couple of different supermarkets and a couple of different cities that we went to to get all these coffees for this lab testing.

And then I wanted to use all that evidence to identify what the actual healthiest coffee would be. So, in this case, for this test, what we use were three different third-party independent labs. That means I have no financial interest in this lab. I don't own any of them. We sent them blind samples of every single coffee that we tested, simply labeled with the coffee, year and a random three-digit number. We used one lab in Brazil, the Universidad Federal de Rio de Janeiro Brazil. We used another lab called Silliker Mérieux NutriSciences in Illinois, and then also the University of Porto in Portugal. So, what we did was we sent these coffees to each of these different labs, and all of this testing took place between June of 2016 to the present. And so, what we looked at–I'll get to here in just a second.

Hey, I want to interrupt today's show to tell you about this cool thing, the company Joovv, which you may have heard me talk about before, J-O-O-V-V. They just sent me this thing that they invented. It's this tiny little Joovv that I can slip into my laptop bag. I can slip into my backpack. I have it up next to my bed and I've been putting on top of my stomach at night, and also kind of like nestling it between my legs at night and shining it on my balls because it's good for that too. It helps your Leydig cells produce testosterone. And also when you shine the red light especially in your bedroom at night, it helps you to sleep. But this is the first time I've ever seen something this small. I mean, it's like the size of a book and this is made by Joovv, the same company that makes these big-ass photobiomodulation units that will treat your whole body–and I have one of those in my office. My kids have little Joovv Mini up in their room. And now I have the Joovv Go. So, I'm Joovving, baby.

This stuff is low EMF. They're FDA cleared. They reduce things like dirty electricity, like flicker rates, and they have medical grade power so you don't even need a long treatment time, 5 to 20 minutes max and you're good. Daily basis with one of these, you get all the proven mitochondrial benefits and blood flow benefits of photobiomodulation. And if you go to joovv.com/ben, they're going to throw in a free gift for you. You just go to J-O-O-V-V.com/ben and may I recommend to you that new Joovv Go that they have, super-duper handy.

This podcast is also brought to you by the purest omega-3 supplement that exists. It's called Omax, O-M-A-X. So, what they did was they engineered a fish oil, specifically for inflammation and joint pain but they put it through this intense distillation process to give it of saturated fats, toxins, PCBs. All that's left is you get these ultra-pure omega-3 fatty acids. They even have this cool thing they do call the freezer test challenge. So, if you freeze any other omega-3 supplement or most of them, they'll get cloudy, and that's all the filler but no max soft gelatin. It stays totally clear. It's that pure. They're clinically tested, they're certified, they're sustainably sourced so it's safe for you and your family, and there are no fish burps because they're so pure. How do you like that? They even call it ultra-pure, duh, because it's pure.

So here's the deal. They're going to give all my listeners 60% off one month's supply of their ultra-pure, plus free shipping and a 60-day money-back guarantee. You heard me right, 60%, free shipping, 60-day money-back guarantee. You just go to tryomax.com/ben. That's T-R-Y-O-M-A-X.com/ben. And I'm sure you hear all the hype around omega-3s. Well, now is your chance to try one of the purest, baby, tryomax.com/ben.

Okay. So, here is exactly what we decided to test these 40 plus different coffee brands for. Number one, we want to test for something called Agtron. That's A-G-T-R-O-N. So, coffee flavor and appearance are directly related to the degree of roasting, which allows you to use a scale with actual numbered rankings for the coffee development and the coffee quality, and what you use for as a special machine that measures color in the coffee. It's called an Agtron spectrophotometer. And that's designed to analyze the degree of the roast and the color appearance in the variation.

So, Agtron instruments use wavelengths of light to illuminate the coffee sample surface and to measure the reflected energy. So, the results are displayed as a 0 to 100. The higher the Agtron number, the lighter the coffee. So, most light roasts are roughly around 65 or higher. And medium roasts fall between about 50 and 65. And dark roasts are below 50. Now, this can be a little bit tricky because the same coffee can be roasted many ways and end up at the same color level. And every choice in heat application over roasting time impacts the way that hundreds of chemical compounds in a coffee bean are changed. But the color can give you a general idea.

I mean, my dad was a gourmet coffee roaster growing up and I'd see him study this stuff intensively. The roasting process itself is more than just like sticking something in the oven and cooking it. And some of it even depends on the quality of the roaster itself but you can at least get an idea of the degree of roasting from this Agtron spectrophotometer. Next, we measured acidity. So, acidity, you've probably heard of it, it's measured in pH. Most coffees have a pH between 4.7 and 5.3 for the best balance of coffee according to most cuppers, who are people who actually flavor coffee and rank coffee. You want to hit somewhere between about 4.95 to 5.05 for pH. That's a really good balance in terms of flavor acidity, et cetera.

Next thing we tested for is mold and yeast. So, yeast and mold aka fungi that can be found in soil and air, likely know already, you can find it in various foods, various food processing environments. And coffee, in particular, is grown in environments that are the ideal conditions for mold to thrive. Many things can go wrong during coffee production and often the result is mold of some sort. Yeast and bacteria are also used. A lot of people don't know this naturally to process the coffee after picking. And so, the tests that we did will show residues that can be left on green coffee, pre-roasted beans, and still linger in the processing equipment where the coffee is actually processed before it makes its way, your home or your coffee shop.

Now, because most yeasts are single-celled organisms that form compact colonies and most molds are filamentous multicellular organisms that form colonies. Mold and yeast test results are measured in terms of what are called colonies. So, these things can grow over a wide pH range from two to about nine for pH. And the temperature range in which they can thrive is pretty broad too. It can be anywhere from 5 Celsius to 35 Celsius. And non-Europeans can convert that into Fahrenheit on your own. But ultimately, the growth of some species can be above or below this range as well. So, mold can survive in a lot of situations.

Now, mold spores are almost certainly destroyed in coffee during the roasting process once you get over at 400 degrees Fahrenheit. That's around 200 degrees Celsius. And during the hot brewing preparation, you can destroy a lot of mold. Now, food companies test for how many colony forming mold spores are present for food safety reasons. And ideally, there's zero mold in the end product of roasted coffee, including the packaging that that coffee winds up in. And the reason that you want to test for mold and yeast is because of the wide variety of health risks that are associated with mold and yeast and fungus in your coffee.

So next is ochratoxin, also known as OTA, ochratoxin A. That's a naturally occurring foodborne mycotoxin that we find in a ton of different agricultural products, particularly grains. It's a toxin produced by Aspergillus and penicillin fungi mold and other fungi eat by releasing enzymes that break their food down into a form that the fungi can absorb. And certain fungi produce toxic byproducts called mycotoxins, and OTA is one of those mycotoxins most often associated with coffee. It's also found in cereals, dried fruits, red wine. It can accumulate an animal tissue. It can cause cancer in humans, especially mammals. It can lead to acute toxicity of the kidneys.

The FDA doesn't have any appropriate level for this toxin. Meaning, they don't have any safeguards or control against its presence in food items, which is concerning to me. The European Union action levels differ by food products. So, in Europe, they're a little bit more strict. But ultimately, roasted coffee should also not have any ochratoxin, and neither should the green coffee either in terms of the amount of ochratoxin or OTA in the green unroasted coffee bean.

Few other things that we want to test for. One is called Bacillus cereus. That's a toxin that's in the environment. It forms in food. It's heat resistant. It can cause vomiting and other digestive disorders through growth in the gut. It's been known to be found on green coffee after processing, and it should be destroyed during roasting. And that said, in my opinion, no green coffee should test positive for B cereus. That's Bacillus cereus, C-E-R-E-U-S. It's another one that is notoriously found in coffee though and it's a definite toxin that can ruin your gut.

Pesticides, again, only 3% of the coffee on the face of the planet is certified organic. And there are over 310 different chemicals that you can test for pesticide. Next is metals. A lot of people aren't aware of this. The metals in coffee; lead, cadmium, copper. A lot of these can accumulate in your tissues over time and they're typically consumed, if they are consumed in the food and in the environment, in addition to of course air pollution and through the skin. So, we wanted to test for metals in a lot of these coffees as well, and that was something else that we added in terms of wanting to ensure that all metals including especially lead, cadmium, copper, mercury is another one. We want very low levels of any of those.

Acrylamide. Acrylamide, you're going to find that many plant-based foods, nearly every food that's baked or roasted or fried including most nut butters, cereals, breads, crackers and coffee of course, acrylamide is a known human neurotoxicant. It can impact the kidneys. It can impact the reproductive organs. And usually, a lot of coffees you can find acrylamide in and the level of acrylamide, if you've listened to the previous podcast that I've done on coffee, can be lowered somewhat through the roasting process. But of course, if you roast too heavily, you produce the other issue, which would be heterocyclic compounds that can be carcinogenic. So, you want to find a sweet spot with roasting. You want to roast the acrylamide out and the mold and the yeast and the fungus, which ideally should even be in the green bean itself, but you also want to get rid of the acrylamide.

Next are chlorogenic acids, and those are phenolic compounds that are linked to antioxidant activity in the coffee. And it's also something that you can use to measure the health compounds in the coffee and its antioxidant activity that leads to a lot of the health effects that I talked about earlier. So, then there's caffeine. You want to know how much caffeine is in your coffee, especially if you're one of these slow coffee responders. And you don't want too much caffeine because you want coffee to be able to pick you up without giving you the jitters.

And then, of course the taste is very important, too. And this is called the cupping score. So, coffee cupping, that's the practice of evaluating different aroma and taste and body characteristics of a coffee to determine the coffee quality. And what we did was we actually had a license, what's called a Licensed Q Grader. A cupping instructor, an industry veteran of over 20 years score every coffee using the traditional cupping methods for coffee, and scoring ranged on 0 to 100.

So, that was everything that we tested in all the third-party independent laboratory testing of these 46 different coffees, and that would include decaffeinated coffees, K-Cup coffees, gourmet coffees, so-called organic coffees, the performance and health market coffees which are no doubt, if you're kind of immersed in this environment, you know there's a lot of different companies out there that health coffees, performance coffees, et cetera. They're kind of a dime a dozen these days.

So, we tested for all of these things; mold, yeast, ochratoxin A, aflatoxins, Bacillus, pesticides, lead, cadmium, copper, acrylamide, chlorogenic acids. We also tested for, which are some of the compounds that can lend themselves to allowing a coffee to be a little bit more stimulatory to the brain, especially if you blend it with ghee or butter or coconut oil or MCT oil or something like that. We measured acidity. We did that Agtron measurement for roast level, and then of course the cupping score.

Then we stepped back and we looked at the results that again, I'm publishing in fold, this wide-open book. You can check them out over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com/coffeepod. That's BenGreenfieldFitness.com/coffeepod. So, what did we find? Well on average, the coffee at Kion, our coffee, had doubled the antioxidant levels of all the coffees tested. In some cases, we had more than 10 times the antioxidant levels. So, it was the healthiest coffee. Hands-down. On average, we had four times the antioxidant levels of all the organic coffees tested. Here's what was shocking. Our coffee tested out 100% mold and mycotoxin free. More than 60% of the coffee that we tested, including these so-called healthy coffees, more than 60% of them came back positive for mold and other contaminants, whereas we tested completely free of mold, ochratoxin A, yeast, everything.

A lot of these results, by the way, these explain why some people can feel a difference when they drink one coffee versus another. I mean, we've had so many people switch to our Kion organic coffee and they've noted no sour stomach, no jitters, better mood, better mental clarity. And I think a big reason for this is not only because of what we found in these lab tests but also the fact that we have zero defects, we only use the highest quality specialty grade coffee beans. We rigidly test for toxins. We never select beans that are chipped enough to risk an uneven roast, of course never beans that contain undesirable microorganisms. We never tolerate pesticide-soaked beans or grow our coffee in fields that are doused with herbicides.

We always start with green beans that are selected for the highest antioxidant levels. We always select for no mold. And the way that we send out our coffee in this special nitrogen flushed packaging means that it stays shelf stable. It can stay for a couple of months shelf stable. You don't need to freeze this stuff. It tastes better if you don't freeze it and you just keep it on hand in your pantry. You can do that for a couple of months. You can easily order like three bags at a time or more and it stays very, very stable because we don't grind it first and we ensure that the packaging eliminates any risk of mold or toxicity or rancidity or anything else along those lines.

Now, if you want to delve into the numbers at all, I could tell you right now our cupping, in terms of our taste, blew nearly every coffee out of the water. I think there were–actually, I think came out one, one coffee because our cupping score turned out to be 85. One coffee brand got an 85.3 but it also had mold in it. So, that was not good. Chlorogenic acid score, ours just blew most of the other brands out of the water. Meaning, if you blend canned coffee with butter or coconut oil or ghee or anything else, you notice it far more readily than you'll notice a lot of these other coffees that you can blend with fats. Our Agtron scores for the roasting, sweet spot. We tested out at between 59 and 65, depending on the roast, which means we are deactivating the acrylamide but it's not roasted so heavily that you've got a lot of these heterocyclic compounds that can be carcinogens. And we also have just enough caffeine but we don't roast it so long that we get rid of too much of the caffeine.

So, I'm going to publish all of these lab results over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com/coffeepod, if you want to check them out. But I was pretty excited when all these came back. I was blown away. I didn't want to throw anybody under the bus so I didn't actually say, “Well, I just label the coffee by numbers rather than by brands” because again, I don't want to throw people under the bus. So, you can go see. They got coffee brand 11 and coffee brand 2 and coffee brand 10, et cetera. And you can also see where the Kion coffee kind of ranks based on the rest of these coffees that we tested. And this is all again totally independent laboratory tests. So, pretty exciting stuff and very, very interesting. Originally, I just wanted this coffee to be healthy but it also tastes amazing, and I think that's part of the Agtron scores and also the antioxidant levels.

So, now, I've informed you as to some of the latest health research on coffee. I've informed you as to the latest greatest results on the laboratory testing that has come in from all the different coffees that we tested. But I promised you that I would also finish up here with dessert, so to speak, this whole idea of coffee enemas. And I have a whole article on coffee enemas but I get a lot of people asking me about this, so I'm going to give you the 101 on coffee enemas, and I'll put plenty of links in the shownotes for the equipment you need and the article I wrote on and everything.

But the idea behind coffee enemas is they have this amazing capacity to enhance gut peristalsis, gallbladder, bile release, liver detoxification, and they're superior to plain water enemas because they have so many more benefits. You've got theobromine, theophylline, palmitic acid, caffeine. All of these things in coffee travel through the capillary bed of your rectum into your portal vein, and that leads directly to your liver. And when they do that, they dilate blood vessels, they open up the bile ducts, they allow the liver to release bile. And when that happens, that also stimulates an enzyme system in the liver that increases glutathione, your master antioxidant by 600% to 700%. That glutathione can then react with free radicals in the bloodstream. It can render them inert. It can enhance both phase 1 and phase 2, liver detoxification pathways. And then in phase 3, these neutralized substances get dissolved in the bile, they get released through the bile flow from the liver and the gallbladder, they get passed up through your intestinal tract, you poop them out. It's that simple.

So here is the 101 on the coffee enema, and I do this once a week, typically on Wednesday mornings. A, you need a coffee enema kit. Don't get plastic. Get medical grade silicone and stainless steel. There's a version on Amazon you can get. I'll put a link to in the shownotes. For portability, there's also a special, like a–what do you call it? Glytamins, glytamins suppository. There's like a coffee enema suppository. When I'm traveling, I don't carry the big old bucket and everything but I do travel with glytamins, which give me a lot of these same benefits in a suppository form. They don't hold a candle to the full on coffee enema but they can do the trick.

So, you've got your stainless-steel bucket. You've got a little clamp that attaches to that with the tube that's going to go up your butt. And of course you want, I shouldn't have to tell this, organic coffee. I definitely don't shove pesticides and herbicides up your backside. So, I like to make my coffee just the same way I normally make my coffee. Some people have special methods of brewing, blending, minting. I just don't want any particulates in my coffee because they can gum up the actual tube.

So, I just use completely pure water. I have a countertop coffee maker called a Wilfa Precision coffee maker. That's the one that I use. So, you make the coffee. And you don't need a lot of coffee to do a coffee enema. I mean, you can use–some people use 30 ounces, some people use 10, some people use just like a thimbleful, like a shot glass. I tend to go big or go home because I just feel better. I feel like it cleans me out quite a bit. And I tend to use about 30 ounces or so of coffee when I do one of these. And what you do is after you've made your coffee, you could do French press, you could do a precision coffee maker, paper filtration. It doesn't matter. Just make sure there are not a lot of coffee particulates in the end product. Then you want to cool it. You do not want to burn your rectum. Trust me.

So, what I do is I actually put a little bit of ice in the coffee and stir it around. And I also make it, because I'll do my coffee enema about 7:00 a.m. in the morning, I'll make the coffee when I get up around 6:00 so it's kind of cooling on the counter and becoming about room temperature. I like room temperature. And some people will go slightly hotter than that, slightly more warm than that. You can do that. I sometimes feel that the coffee enema is hard to retain when the water is too hot. One trick for that, by the way, if you just can't keep this coffee inside you after you've done the stainless-steel enema up your booty is you can add a couple of tablespoons of blackstrap molasses to the coffee. That helps you to retain the enema if you want to do that. Some people say there are additional benefits in terms of antioxidants with the blackstrap molasses but that's up to you.

The other thing that some people will do is they'll make it French press style but then they'll filter it through a fine strainer or coffee filter paper when they pour it into the stainless-steel bucket to filter out some of those larger coffee particulates. So, the grounds, so to speak. Okay. So, next, you lay a towel on the bathroom floor or in the bathtub. You put that stainless-steel bucket with the tube coming out of it up above you so you're laying down below it. And then you remove any air from the enema tube by opening up the little clamp so all the air comes out, a little bit of coffee starts to come out, then you close the clamps like it's rid of any air in the tube. You don't want air in your colon. It makes it harder to retain the enema.

I like to lubricate the enema tip. And usually, the enema tip itself is disposable. When you get your enema, it'll come with all these disposable tips that you attach to the tube. I lube that up with a little bit of coconut oil, and then in it goes. So, once all the coffee is inside–usually for me, that takes about two minutes as it all flows in. And I have that tube usually about, I would say somewhere in the range of four to eight centimeters up inside of me. You open the clamp and it all comes flowing in. Once it's all in, you stop it before air bubbles start to come out and then you remove it.

Then at that point, you lay over on your left side and you just lay there for about 20 minutes. You can do a little bit of reading, meditation. I dink around on my phone. Some people like to massage their abdomen. That seems to help a little bit. Then you get up, go to the toilet, and you do your duty. Usually, it cleans you out really well and you feel amazing really cleaning out. If you feel like a little weird or a little bloated afterwards, you can actually kind of rub–I like a little peppermint oil or anything. CBD oil works really well also. You rub that from a left to right direction kind of clockwise all around the stomach and that can help to get rid of any bloating or anything like that. And then you're done. Then you clean up the bathroom, you clean up the coffee, and you're done.

Now, I realized that was a super-fast walkthrough of the coffee enema. But ultimately, it is not that hard. A lot of people think this is like a freaking medical surgical procedure but it's not that hard. And I have a whole article where I walked through this in details. If you want to print it out and follow it step by step, I'll link to that in the shownotes for this episode. But in addition to drinking my coffee, to get all of the health benefits that you heard about from the mouth, you can also get all the liver, the gallbladder, and the gut peristalsis benefits by using a good organic coffee up the backside. And that's a weekly practice for me.

And again, when I travel, I use these little things called glytamins and they're kind of like a suppository version of what I just described. After I use the bathroom in the morning, I put those inside me. I go to a handstand against the wall for about five minutes or a headstand, and then into a handstand. I kind of go back and forth as long as I'm inverted for about five minutes. I just kind of mess around inverting myself in any which way. If I'm at home, I can use a yoga swing or yoga trapeze or inversion table. And I usually don't need to defecate after that. You just hold it up inside you and you absorb all the antioxidants and the caffeine and everything. So, those are pretty slick as well. Literally, they're slick.

So, I realized that you guys may have questions. You might want to look at the labs. You might want to ensure that you don't injure yourself doing a coffee enema. Proceed with caution. No need to put butter in it, by the way. And if you do have questions or you want to look at the results or anything else or you want to get the Kion coffee, we have tons of specials going on. If you want the purest, most antioxidant-rich proven, laboratory proven healthiest coffee on the face of the planet, just go to the shownotes for this episode. They're at BenGreenfieldFitness.com/coffeepod. That's BenGreenfieldFitness.com/coffeepod.

Hopefully, you like these solosodes where I just drone on. I realize sometimes I stumble with my words and sometimes it just sounds like I'm talking as I go because I am. I just sit here and I think what is it that you guys would like to hear about and I spill the beans to you. In this case, I guess I did, pun intended, spilled the coffee beans to you. So, there you go, BenGreenfieldFitness.com/coffeepod. Have an amazing week. Enjoy your coffee. Thanks for listening.

Want more? Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com or you can subscribe to my information-packed and entertaining newsletter and click the link up on the right-hand side of that web page that says, “Ben recommends,” where you'll see a full list of everything I've ever recommended to enhance your body and your brain. Finally, to get your hands on all of the unique supplement formulations that I personally develop, you can visit the website of my company, Kion, at getK-I-O-N.com. That's getK-I-O-N.com.

 

I’ll always carry with me fond childhood memories of waking up every morning to the unmistakable scent of roasted green coffee beans and rushing downstairs to greet the big freight trucks that would arrive in our driveway jam-packed with burlap sacks from Guatemala, Costa Rica, Tanzania and beyond.

My Dad, a serial entrepreneur, decided to take a deep dive into the coffee business just about the point I was becoming a teenager.

So as you can imagine, by the age of 13, I was a tiny little coffee connoisseur myself. And at the ripe ol’ age of 21, during my time at University of Idaho, I worked as the manager of my parents’ coffee shop, “Bucer’s Coffeehouse & Pub” in Moscow, Idaho as well as a French bakery down the street serving chocolate croissants accompanied by piping hot cups of designer coffee.

Fast forward to present day and coffee continues to be a huge part of my life. I suck the stuff down like hydrogen-enriched water and am now selling my very own organic coffee through my company Kion.

So, today, I’m going to dive deeper into the subject of coffee than I’ve ever dived before in this ultimate coffee podcast that will teach you everything you need to know about coffee health, including the latest lab results on which coffee came out on top as the healthiest when tested against 46 of the world’s top coffee brands.

In this “solosode” podcast, you'll also discover:

-The top recently researched benefits of coffee…5:45

• NYT reports that coffee drinkers may live longer
• JAMA article: Association of Coffee Drinking With Mortality by Genetic Variation in Caffeine Metabolism
• Drinking coffee may contribute to a longer lifespan.
• 2017 study on the connection between coffee and a longer lifespan

-Reasons coffee may contribute to a longer lifespan…9:25

• Strong correlation between increased coffee consumption and reduced risk of cardiovascular disease.
• Regular coffee drinkers have 20% decreased risk of stroke.
• Coffee has polyphenols
• Over 1000 studies have linked coffee to cancer prevention
• Caffeinated coffee profound decrease in risk of breast, prostate and liver cancer.
• Caffeinated coffee correlated to reduced risk of Parkinson's disease.
• Decreases risk of depression
• My podcastwith Dr. Sanjiv Chopra on the health benefits of coffee

-When to be careful with your coffee intake…15:45

• Avoid addiction. Switch to tea from time to time
• If you're a slower caffeine metabolizer
• If you're pregnant

-How the health benefits of coffee are compromised through packaging and processing…18:15

• The vast majority of coffee companies do not package their product touting the health benefits of coffee
• 5 problems to watch out for:
  1. Most coffee cherries are doused with pesticides and chemicals
  2. Even organic coffees use substandard beans
  3. Coffee beans often develop mold in the production process
  4. Roasting process often chars the coffee beans. Burns away health benefits.
  5. It's stale; sits in the store for 6-12 months before being purchased.

-What we tested for in each of the coffees we tested…27:00

• Level of roasting (We used an Agtron spectrophotometer)
• Acidity
• Mold and yeast (fungi)
• Ochratoxin A (OTA)
• Bacillus cereus
• Pesticides (Only 3% of coffees are certified organic)
• Metals
• Acrylamide 
• Chlorogenic acids
• Caffeine
• “Cupping” score (quality)

-The results of our comprehensive coffee test…36:40

-How to do a coffee enema…40:47

• My article on coffee enemas
• What you'll need:
  • Coffee enema kit(not plastic)
  • Suppository(when traveling)
  • Organic coffee
  • Wilfa Precision Coffee Maker
• I use around 30 oz. of coffee.
• Cool it. (Ideal is room temperature)

And much more!

Resources for this episode:

–Kion Coffee

–Glytamins

–Stainless steel coffee enema kit

–A Quest To Find The Purest Coffee On The Planet (& The Shocking Truth About Popular “Organic” Coffee Beans)

–The Kion Coffee Enema: Everything You’ve Always Wanted To Know About Coffee Enemas (But Were Afraid To Ask).

–23 Years Of Suckin’ Down Coffee: Tips, Tricks & Hacks I’ve Discovered For Getting The Most Out Of One Of The Safest Superfoods That Exists.

–63 Cups Of Coffee A Day & More: Five Simple Things You Can Do to Live a Longer, Healthier Life.

–How To Buy, Roast, Grind & Brew The Healthiest Cup Of Coffee You’ll Ever Drink.

–Is Decaf Coffee Healthy, Can You Have Too Much Iron, How Often Should You Pee On The Bike And More!

–Sex, Coffee & Chocolate While Pregnant, Babies On Airplanes, Eating Placentas & More: The Mama Natural Week-by-Week Guide to Pregnancy and Childbirth

–The Latest On Longevity, Natural Ways To Increase Testosterone, Should You Drink Coffee On An Empty Stomach, The Ultimate Airplane Biohacking Guide & More!

Episode Sponsors:

–The Kion Daily Life Bundle Ben Greenfield and Team Kion’s Go-to, Everyday Essentials!

• Kion Aminos Tablets
• Kion Bar (12)
• Kion Coffee
• Kion Lean

–GainsWave Firmer, more resilient erections. Take it from me, IT WORKS! Get a free treatment when you purchase 6 treatments using my link.

–JOOVV Enhance Your Health with Light Therapy. Try the brand new JOOVV Go. Get a free gift with your purchase when you use my link.

–Omax The purest Omega 3 supplement in the world. Get 60% off your first order, free shipping, and a 60-day money back guarantee.