 Coffee can be a problem for many reasons, whether it's the agrochemicals, the herbicides and pesticides that were sprayed on the crops, the mold and mycotoxins that could have grown as the beans were stored, or even just the anti-nutrients that are dousing your gut bacteria every morning as coffee is a seed and the goal of a seed is to survive the digestion of whatever animal consumes it. Therefore, it has nutrients that are balanced in negative substances. But the biggest problem here is the amount of caffeine stressing your adrenals. So let's do a brief overview of the adrenal glands, what their functions are, and that will give you an understanding of why you shouldn't be drinking coffee. After you say, oh my god, these are literally the most important glands in the body as they produce so much of our hormones and such a variety of hormones. So they're situated on top of the kidney and they're very small about walnut sized and the adrenals produce steroid hormones. So the first category are glucocorticoids and these bind to the glucocorticoid receptor in every cell in our body that regulates genes, DNA, therefore it's involved in human development, metabolism and immune response. The two primary ones are cortisol and corticosterone. Cortisol is necessary for converting macronutrients into energy, fats, carbohydrates and proteins. So when you have energy dysfunction, it's easier to see why we have an obesity epidemic if everyone in America is chugging down coffee all day. And it also regulates blood pressure and cardiovascular function. Again, another popular problem we see in most Americans, high blood pressure. Corticosterone regulates immune response and suppresses inflammatory reaction. We can see why everyone has autoimmune diseases in some capacity. The second category is mineral corticoids and these maintain the balance of salt and water in our bodies. The most popular one, aldosterone, I'm sure most of you guys have heard of it. It stimulates the kidneys to reabsorb salt, therefore retaining water. The third category are the sex steroids, androgens, astrogens and progestogens. Male and female sex hormones, of course, you have the testosterone for males and estradiol for females that occur in various amounts depending on your sex. And the ovaries and testes produce more than the adrenals, but the adrenals still produce these sex hormones. The fourth category is catecholamines, and these are neurotransmitter stress hormones. Dopamine acts as a messenger for the most part, and it's a precursor to epinephrine, a.k.a. adrenaline, and norepinephrine, which is noradrenaline. Adrenaline spikes blood sugar to convert glycogen to glucose, and noradrenaline increases your heart rate and blood pressure correspondingly to deliver that glucose to where it needs to go. What's pretty interesting about these hormones is that each of these four categories are produced in different parts of the adrenal. So here we have the outer capsule, two cortexes, and the medulla. So on the very outer part, the mineral corticoids are produced. A little further in, the glucose corticoids, as we go further in, the steroid hormones, and then towards the center, the stress hormones are produced. And it's kind of interesting because as you go further in, it's almost like they're more important. So once you see how many hormones the adrenals produce, how many vital functions they're involved in, it becomes pretty easy to understand how if they're not working, if you have adrenal dysfunction, it can result in so many different health issues. And in relation to other glands in the body, the adrenals are pretty large, even though compared to the kidney, other organ systems, they're not that large. They're magnitudes larger than the pituitary and the glands in our brain. So the adrenal hormones are produced in response to signals from those glands in our brain, the pituitary gland, and the pituitary gland reacts to signaling from the hypothalamus, and that's another gland in the brain. So the interaction between these three glands is referred to as the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis. The problem with coffee is where caffeine stimulates neuron activity in the brain, in which those neurons send messages to the pituitary gland to stimulate the adrenal glands, which then produce adrenaline and cortisol. Caffeine can cause your adrenals to overwork, constantly making more of these stress hormones, and with chronic caffeine usage, poor diet, lifestyle, and sleep, you end up with adrenal fatigue, aka burned out adrenal glands. Many of you are probably familiar with the term adrenal fatigue, body aches, fatigue, nervousness, sleep disturbances, and digestive problems. I'm sure you've heard the term keto eyes as these people love sucking down coffee, blowing out their adrenals, all without consuming carbohydrates, and the reason people suggest carbohydrates as a solution to adrenal fatigue is because if you're having cortisol issues and a problem converting fat and protein to energy, carbohydrates might remedy that, but not always. It's a super simple concept. Coffee has caffeine, caffeine overworks your adrenals, and then your body isn't able to produce the correct ratios of hormones and all of the hormones necessary for our bodies to function properly. So obviously you want to remove coffee, any source of caffeine in the diet, at least temporarily as long as you can, now is one cup of organic, high quality coffee going to be detrimental. For most people I would say in some capacity, unless you're able to perfect every single aspect of your lifestyle, there is a very good chance that coffee is preventing you from feeling your best. I've gone more in depth on coffee in past videos, not on the adrenal fatigue aspect, but how to wean off coffee, the anti-nutrients. The quickest, simple option is to make an americano, which is just an espresso with hot water, which has a fraction of the caffeine that a regular cup of coffee does. Basically, taper down on the amount of caffeine you're consuming until you're only sucking on a few coffee beans throughout the day. The dietary and lifestyle factors that need to be corrected, what foods to eat, what supplements to take, can be understood by watching various videos I have on my channel. You guys can check out my book, the audio book, my carnival diet video course, everything available on frank-defano.com. Some of you might be wondering if consuming adrenal glands can fix adrenal fatigue. I try that, I didn't notice a difference. When you're consuming a gland to fix an organ, chances are the gland does have substances that are conducive to fixing the organ, but in some cases, extreme cases caused by modern problems, you need amounts that don't occur in natural foods. So it could be severe copper deficiency, you might need a lot of K2, you might need a lot of this B vitamin, that's what we're here to figure out. Yes, taking glandulars has helped some people, but can you just replicate the nutrients that were in those glands? That might be what's necessary in a lot of cases. So thank you guys for joining me today. You know how to support me down in the description below. Let me know how you liked this and what other educational videos you would like to see. I ditched the dress shirt as, I think it looks ridiculous with the man bun. So we'll see, maybe Frank will get a haircut eventually.