 So many people drink coffee without actually knowing much about it. I'm going to help you understand the pros and cons of coffee, hopefully leading you to increasing the quality of coffee you're consuming, perhaps even eliminating it from your diet entirely. Coffee is actually the seed of a fruit known as the coffee cherry. As with all seeds, its goal is to survive the digestive system of the animal that ate said fruit to become implanted in the soil, grow into another coffee tree. This is why seeds have substances known as anti-nutrients, things like phytates, phytic acid, oxalates, oxalic acid that help the seed survive the digestive system of the animal by binding to minerals, taking them out of the body. And although this might not be too much of an issue in small amounts, what we're essentially doing is very unnatural. We're taking thousands of seeds and running hot water through them and consuming them. A lot of the other things from modern agriculture that we consume now are actually seeds. Bread is made from the wheatberry. The wheatberry is from wheatgrass. It is the seed of that plant. It's kind of crazy how far away, you know, we've gotten from nature yet how close we almost are. Certain herbivorous animals actually have adaptations to these anti-nutrients. As you guys know, there are many animals who subsist mainly off of seeds. Humans don't have those adaptations. What humans have are traditional preparation methods, such as fermentation. And depending on how the coffee is made, you know, the anti-nutrient content can be lowered to some degree. Other negative things can happen, such as an increase in histamines from the fermentation process. But by going through how coffee is processed, we can kind of understand which is better for certain reasons. But what will actually determine how healthy the coffee is for you is more in line with how it's made and how fresh it is. This is important, but not as important as other factors. People aren't really afraid of coffee. They think it's good for you. And what I hear brought up a lot is antioxidants. But the antioxidant content of coffee is insignificant, even compared to something like the coffee cherry. Eating the coffee cherry itself would give you hundreds to thousands of times the amount of antioxidants that drinking a cup of coffee would. So think about the coffee cherry. We need to get to the seed. We need to take that seed. We need to dry it so it can then be roasted and ground up into powder and then we can run hot water through it and douse our intestines. So washed coffee is where you take this coffee cherry, you remove all the fruit, everything. You ferment the seeds for 12 to 72 hours and then you allow them to dry. That can then be roasted and ground up into coffee. The natural or dry process is taking this coffee cherry, laying it out in the sun to dry, it'll turn into like a raisin and then they take that raisin-like coffee cherry, run it through a machine that removes the fruit, it is then able to be roasted and turned into coffee. The honey process is not as common as these other two. That is where they clean the coffee cherry, most of the fruit off. They leave a little bit of fruit on the seed known as mucilage. It is then dried immediately without fermentation. So this is arguably fresher, more aromatic, more complex. Since these two coffees are fermented to some degree, you might want to say that the phytic acid content, the phytates are lower because phytic acid is one of the anti-nutrients that is actually lowered during fermentation but it doesn't seem like the fermentation process of coffee is long enough to lower it. The honey process, I mean I would basically just try each of these coffees and see if you notice a difference in how you feel as opposed to trying to pick one because of certain reasons. Yes, the fermentation might increase the histamines, yes, this one might be slightly higher in some sort of beneficial compound, possibly even lower in some anti-nutrients but at the end of the day, anecdotal experimenting is what we have to do. What is important is buying organic coffee. There are certain herbicides and pesticides that are illegal in the United States that can be used in other countries. So if the crop isn't organic, it might be sprayed with these very harmful herbicides and pesticides. So out of anything you do with your coffee, making sure it's organic might be the most significant quality difference. On to the cons of what coffee can actually do in your body. So of course we have the adrenal stress issue related to consuming caffeine. Caffeine increases cortisol, the stress hormone in the body, which can increase blood glucose. This leads to insulin resistance and system-wide inflammation. Stressing the adrenals is a much larger issue in females. Paul Check goes over this and we'll talk about him later. He says that a woman is meant to carry two. So they have a much lower tolerance for stress on glandular systems like the adrenals. They are essentially a hormonal backup. So a woman can actually experience menstrual issues, fertility issues, a lot more stress and anxiety when they consume coffee. Caffeine has a half-life of four to six hours. What that means is if you drink a cup of coffee with 300 milligrams of caffeine at 8 a.m., at noon, four hours later, you'll still have half of that. 150 milligrams of caffeine in your bloodstream at 4 p.m., it'll be down to 75, at 8 p.m., it'll be down to 32.5, and at midnight, maybe when you're trying to go to bed, it'll be down to about 16 milligrams of caffeine. But you still have caffeine in your bloodstream when you're going to bed. So consuming coffee outside of the morning, you're going to have a lot of caffeine in your system. Histamines aren't really talked about. Histamines are an immune response in the body. The histamine content of a food depends on how much it was aged, and as coffee is a fermented food and a very old food, considering how long ago it was picked, coffee can be very high in histamines for some people. And depending on which of the four histamine receptors they bind to, you can experience so many different symptoms. You could have skin issues, you could have heart palpitations, insomnia, that's completely unrelated to caffeine. Histamines can cause a lot of issues, and they're pretty easy to recognize. You'll have an intolerance to aged foods, fermented foods for the most part. Coffee has a bowel clearing effect. Some people think this is a positive, but in both the urine and the feces, we see extra mineral excretion in people that drink coffee. One of the larger issues can be, if you stop drinking coffee, you become constipated because you no longer have that level of stimulation to clear your stomach. This means that you really have to dial in your diet and fix other things if you stop drinking coffee. Arrays and triglycerides was initially observed by a vegan doctor, John McDougal, as well as Dave Feldman of the cholesterol code. He's done a lot of personal experiments on cholesterol. What they both noticed was triglycerides were fairly drastically increased, I believe about 10 to 20 percent, and for anyone who knows the importance of triglycerides in the blood, that's literally the amount of fat and lipids in your blood. It's a pretty good indicator of a risk for heart disease and if things are going right. They didn't really say why coffee raised your triglycerides. I don't know if they couldn't figure it out. I don't know if I missed it, but I'm assuming the reason coffee raises your triglycerides has to do with the increase in glucose in the bloodstream. It could also have to do with just system-wide inflammation, maybe from histamines. Another hypothesis I had was coffee can bind to minerals and take them out of the body. So if coffee is inhibiting your magnesium absorption, maybe you're not synthesizing certain vitamins properly, therefore causing more inflammation, either way, it has been proven that coffee increases your triglycerides fairly drastically. I would be interested to see if someone was following some of the recommendations I make later if the same thing would happen. One thing that is commonly overlooked is the water source. Are you going to a Starbucks that doesn't have a water filter to remove fluoride and chlorine? There are so many possible negative things in water that fluoride and chlorine are just the tip of the iceberg, but it's something that can be eliminated. Sodium fluoride is different than calcium fluoride. Calcium fluoride is naturally occurring. Sodium fluoride we artificially add to water and it can cause issues in our bodies. Chlorine is literally a disinfectant. Do you want to disinfect your gut bacteria when you drink water full of chlorine? Fluoride can also be in the soil. This is more of an issue when growing tea leaves, such as black tea or green tea because the soil is high in fluoride. The tea leaves suck up the fluoride and then you have this tea that's essentially like dousing your digestive system with fluoride. Not good. Onto the two primary anti-nutrient concerns. We have phytates, phytic acid, as well as oxalates. Both of these bind to certain minerals and take them out of the body. I believe both of them have an affinity for binding to calcium. Oxalates in particular are known for binding to calcium. They can also bind to magnesium and potassium to some degree. Phytic acid, as far as I know, can actually bind to just about everything. Iron, copper, manganese, and take it out of the bloodstream. Again, this doesn't seem like too much of an issue if you were consuming a seed in an amount that it would naturally occur in an environment. Maybe you have an apple that has a couple of seeds in it, but when you're dousing your stomach with seed water, we run into issues. The phytic acid content of the coffee is primarily dictated by the water exposure of the coffee. So when you have something like drip coffee or French press, the longer the water sits in contact with the coffee, the higher the phytic acid content is. That's why even instant coffee and espresso is much lower in phytates than traditional drip coffee is. Phytic acid is a concern in tea, as well, and nut milks especially. If you're a vegan and you're adding a couple tablespoons of nut milk, I know you boys and girls love your nut milk, that has more phytic acid than the coffee itself. Nut milks like almond milk, cashew milk, soy milk especially have the highest phytate content out of anything we're really discussing here. Overall, I don't see phytic acid as too much of a concern here specifically as all of these other things are documented much more commonly, especially oxalates. In kidney stone patients, 80% of dietary oxalates actually came from coffee or tea. And what's weird is the amount of oxalates in coffee isn't actually that significant, but it goes to show that frequently consuming coffee, which is a large surface area food, where essentially dousing your whole digestive system in a small amount of oxalates, we can assume the absorption is going to be pretty high. Oxalates can literally not only cause kidney stones by binding to calcium and depositing in your kidneys, they can deposit in other parts of your body, other tissues, and just cause system-wide inflammation. Hyperoxularia is determined by genes and diet. That's simply the inability to detox oxalates properly. As I said, this can be you not having genes that help produce enzymes to deal with it, or you might just have too many oxalates in the diet. Oxalates give food their bitter flavor and they are also a concern in tea. So maybe coffee that's less bitter is lower in oxalates. I'm not really sure what determines the oxalate content of coffee specifically, but out of all the things here, the adrenal stress, the triglycerides, and the oxalates definitely might warrant you experimenting with eliminating coffee for a period of time. So Paul Check is a holistic health practitioner. He has a video series on YouTube on coffee that I encourage you guys to go check out and say hello. About half of the information on here is actually from him. He also talks about coffee having a drying process on the body. It can cause you to overheat. It can impede athletic recovery. It can even cause tightness in muscle tissues and tension. He says that coffee can cause sexual issues in the ability to ejaculate. And coffee can also feed fungal infections. So if you have a fungal infection, definitely want to avoid coffee. On to the benefits of coffee. It does have amino acids combined with caffeine that can definitely aid athletic performance. And the reason bulletproof coffee started and people started adding fat to their coffee was to increase the digestion of these amino acids. Paul Check mentions that you should rotate oils so you don't develop an allergy to them. He also puts a grass-fed raw butter in his coffee and I always advocate for using high quality raw dairy products like milk, cream, or butter in your coffee. And I think it's very important that if you are putting something in your coffee that it is a high quality animal fat, you're getting fat soluble vitamins. You're getting fats that help you digest the amino acids. So after all of these pros and cons, how do we actually make an ideal cup of coffee? It starts with these three processes. Of course, organic. You want to mess around with these, see what you tolerate better. Make sure you're grinding the coffee beans as fresh as possible. So within a day to a couple of days, not only do you want to grind your beans as frequently as possible, you want to consume the coffee within about 10 minutes because it starts to oxidize. You guys with your mugs of coffee sipping on it for five, six, seven, eight hours a day are consuming rancid oxidized hot seed water. Not good. Lots of inflammation, lots of stress on your body. For preparation method, Americanos are ideal or espressos and Americano is just an espresso with hot water added. This is because it has a low exposure time to the beans. Therefore it's much lower in anti-nutrients as well as caffeine. It has less than a quarter the amount of caffeine that traditional drip coffee does. We can assume that it also has a fraction of the anti-nutrients and negative substances, but it tastes just as good. So I strongly encourage you guys to try switching to Americanos. Let me know how that makes you feel. This is one of Paul Chek's suggestions. Some more of his suggestions are making sure you sleep in line with your circadian rhythm, you know, go to bed when the sun goes down, wake up when the sun comes up. He recommends you can chew beans like chew coffee beans to keep a little bit of caffeine in your system. And also he says you can use dark chocolate. I mean both of these still have phytates, oxalates. Even chocolate has these negative substances in them, so you might be opening up another can of worms, but it's definitely better than sucking down several cups of coffee every day. But why is everyone drinking coffee? It's because we're not getting enough sun, aka vitamin D3. If you guys haven't checked out my video yesterday, you should tan naked. It's actually me explaining the importance of vitamin D3. So if you aren't supplementing vitamin D3 or getting enough sun, definitely check out that video. For me, vitamin D3 is like coffee. It gives me energy. I have out of bed every single day ready to do anything. So this is to me a very important element of getting off of coffee and becoming the optimal version of yourself. Hopefully, I haven't discouraged too many of you. Whether or not you want to improve the quality of your coffee or maybe even try eliminating it for a period of time, it really is addictive and there are withdrawal symptoms. So this is something that has to be addressed with a level of intelligence. Thank you guys for joining me today. If you guys would like to support me further, just check out some of the other videos on my channel. Of course, guys, please like, subscribe, hit that bell icon, and share the video if you can. Recently, I have launched Frankie's Free Range Meat. My goal being to provide you guys with high quality, nutrient-dense animal foods, we are looking to provide high quality raw dairy in the future. So if you guys want to learn more about Frankie's Free Range Meat and possibly support our future goals, check out the website frankiesfreerangemeat.com. Edit a bunch of new products in the past week. We have some caviar, we have some cod liver, very affordable, nutrient-dense foods to aid your vitamin D3 absorption. Again, thank you guys for joining me today. Enjoy the rest of your week.