Is Coffee Good for You? – James Hoffmann review of scientific literature [video]
youtube.comCoffee doesn’t feel like something that’s good for me. But I hope it is. Regardless, I never felt good about pouring hot water in a plastic aeropress.
We've been conditioned that there's no free lunch. That if something feels good, it must be bad for us. It's not always true.
The more complicated version of this is "if drugs were an improvement to our overall evolutionary fitness, we'd have evolved to do what the drug does by default". This opens up interesting avenues of thought, because some drugs aren't an improvement to fitness in the ancestral environment.
Stimulants usually make you burn more energy, so they're fertile ground now that calories are cheap. Dietary energy has only been affordable for a couple of centuries, so there's not a lot of time to have evolved more wasteful bodies and minds.
This. If the reward cycle for a hyper brain was shorter, we would all be genius mental colibris, but then easily exhausted to tupor and would have these debates over stimulants to extend the hyper or reduce byproducts of accelarated "normal" consciousness.
There isn't one when it comes to coffee, though I accept your fundamental premise that "no free lunch" isn't always true.
Coffee may be good for your healthspan but addiction to caffeine is real and you lose the nootropic benefits if you hit it every day, as most coffee drinkers do. In fact, it's worse than this, because your brain performs worse before it gets its coffee, at which point a daily drinker will just arrive back to baseline performance. Not to mention the irritation, "don't talk to me before my coffee", etc. that other people have to deal with before you get your fix. Or the hit to your wallet whenever you purchase coffee from your local barista.
I want to be clear I'm not throwing shade on the other healthspan benefits of coffee that do come from daily drinking but pretending coffee is a free lunch is naive.
Coffee != Caffeine && Caffeine != Coffee.
Before I switched to drinking coffee, I used to drink carbonated caffeinated beverages like Coke and Pepsi. Up to twelve per day. I'm convinced that is what gave me diabetes. So, I switched to Diet Coke. But then I learned about all the bad chemicals in Diet Coke and Coke Zero, so I switched to coffee.
I drank caffeinated coffee for a long time. Decades. Occasionally, I would get to a state where if I had too much coffee, I would get caffeine headaches. And if I didn't drink enough coffee, I would get caffeine headaches. And there was no gap between those two states. I'd have to completely decaffeinate for a while, before I could reset my system.
A few years ago, I switched to cold brew coffee, because it has about 70% less acid than hot brew. That was much better for my stomach.
Then about a year ago, I switched to decaf cold brew, because the caffeine was causing too many problems with my heart rate, and my four different blood pressure medications weren't able to keep me in a good enough state.
So, I stopped drinking coffee altogether. Now, it's just plain water. And I do feel a lot better. No heart rate problems, no excess acid, etc....
Just my experience. YMMV.
I've finally switched from a bodum with a silicon ring, and plastic struts, to a 100% stainless steel french press (groenenberg). Slightly worse isolation, but otherwise awesome.
Then you should probably check out Hoffmann's "ultimate french press technique" https://youtu.be/st571DYYTR8 IMO it produces the best coffee I've ever been able to make in a french press.
Tried it, not a fan. But I also generally think french press produces the best coffee
Well, is it? Really should have a transcript or at least a small conclusion paragraph. Not keen on going through 15min of video.
My mother and father gave me my genetics, they both drank coffee for many years and are still alive and cancer free into their late 70s. My great grandmother drank coffee ritually as well and lived well into her 90s. Organic coffee is likely best, as it most resembles coffee of the past which was safer to drink...
I love coffee, but noticed I get grumpy and feel a bit stiff in the joints if I drink more than one cup a day, and sometimes I alternate with tea. That's all I really need to determine what works for me. I highly recommend when conflicting media reports are everywhere to start evaluating your background like that to create calm (if you can do so of course) or simply to embrace your mortality and realize that pollution and other factors make everyone's future quite unpredictable regardless.
>a bit stiff in the joints
I found out that I am sometimes allergic to citric acid, which turns out is made from mold. If I have more than one citrus flavor drink I get sore joints. Theoretically the mold is filtered in the final product but I suspect this is not always done well. I just avoid it now but dang its in everything.
Coffee supposedly has trace mold on it could be a similar problem.
Mold that survives a 450 degree Fahrenheit (232 celcius) roasting process?
You are assuming the process is always done with no cross contamination or commingling in shared space after this process is done. Considering most coffee is processed in poor countries do you think they are vigilant about maintaining and absorbing the cost of doing it 100% of the time?
Same as the citric acid problem I have. Supposedly it is filtered but turns out that is not always the case often enough that I find it is better to just avoid it altogether rather than feel bad all day.
How about decaf?
He mentioned towards the end of the video that he's got a deep dive on decaffeination coming up soon