Drink Clean Coffee
Coffee is known to be a “tricky” beverage. While some people seem to drink it by the pitcher, others have negative effects from only small doses. The most common adverse effects from coffee that I seem to hear are stomach pain, acid reflux, headaches and anxiety. While sometimes the problem is actually the coffee, I wanted to share a surprising idea: some adverse effects from coffee are not due to the coffee bean itself, but instead they are due to mold contaminants from coffee’s processing.
For many years I was under the impression that I couldn’t drink coffee. Me and coffee just weren’t friends. Usually when I had a cup I would immediately feel anxiety, palpitations, brain fog and sometimes my skin would get itchy. Sometimes coffee would make me feel energetic and almost too amped up and then sometimes my body would feel so heavy that I needed a nap. So I stopped drinking it for years. I switched to tea and enjoyed the many varieties and benefits of the mighty tea leaf. Hurray for tea!
But then one day, about 8 years ago I listened to the Bulletproof Podcast where I was given an education on the coffee making process. It turns out that making “clean” coffee is not easy. Coffee producers that want to maximize profit will often take low quality beans (usually the Robusta variety) from a humid jungle environment (like Vietnam) where the beans are always contaminated with mold. These moldy beans are then fermented during the regular coffee-making process, which makes the mold problem worse. Without getting too far into the weeds on the process of coffee production, it turns out that many of the negative effects from coffee may be due to mold contamination.
At the surface level a bit of mold might not sound like a big deal… but some of these molds are highly toxic varieties including Aflatoxin B1 and Ochratoxin A. At high doses these mold toxins can be deadly, but at lower levels they can just mess up your day. In the coffee business this contamination problem is well known, so there are international standards for the import and export of coffee. Each country has its own allowable levels of these toxins and the US allows for much higher levels of these toxins than other regions (like Europe).
So how can we drink clean coffee and avoid these mold toxins? I recommend two companies that specialize in making mold-free coffee. I should warn you that these coffees do cost a bit more, but consider the cost of having a bad day because your coffee contains Aflatoxin B1! The companies that I know of making mold-free coffee are Bulletproof and Kion. Both of these companies have developed their beans with exactly this mold issue in mind. Although I am mostly a tea drinker I have purchased and enjoyed coffee from both of these brands. I recommend purchasing the whole bean version of their coffees and grinding the beans yourself, this will provide additional protection against any potential mold contamination.
