John Myers
Coffee is the passion of many people. At the same time, coffee poses a certain health risk – depending on the amount consumed and your personal constitution. Due to the roasting process, coffee is not tolerable for everyone. Coffee is considered acidic, and its caffeine is clearly addictive. However, if you are one of those people who absolutely cannot live without coffee, then you might want to know how to make your coffee enjoyment healthier.
Coffee – straight from the bush, a natural pleasure
Basically, of course, coffee is not all bad. Because it is nothing more than the seed of a pretty white flowering shrub that thrives wonderfully in partial shade.
But the coffee industry obviously has to do something with the coffee seeds (they aren’t beans, but the pips of stone fruit), so that the small pips lose a very large part of their naturalness and their actual taste.
Because if you harvest coffee fruits fresh from the bush, soak them in water and then let them ferment; if you painstakingly remove the pulp and let the seeds dry in the sun; If you now roast the kernels in a simple clay oven – as is traditional in the coffee countries of origin – grind them with a hand-operated grinder and finally brew them into coffee, then this drink tastes completely different from the coffee that you can buy everywhere or that usually prepare them in your kitchen.
Natural coffee tastes a bit like chocolate with a little honey flavor.
Coffee – One of the most important sources of antioxidants for many people
Despite strong industrial and aroma-falsifying processing, coffee is considered one of the most important sources of antioxidants for the population in industrialized nations. This is of course almost tragic and shows how disastrous the diet of most people looks.
If coffee is one of the most important sources of antioxidants, then this means that all the other antioxidant sources – vegetables, fruits, salads, and nuts – are hardly consumed.
In this context, it is of course also tragic that the organism of many people has to pay a hefty price for these antioxidants. He has to deal with the acid formation and stomach irritation of the coffee and of course with the psychotropic effects of caffeine.
Fortunately, the antioxidants in coffee are not ineffective, so it is not surprising that the mass of published scientific studies is so praising coffee.
Coffee is said to reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease, depression, stroke, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and asthma, as well as cancer of the liver, intestines, kidneys, and prostate.
So it should do everything that antioxidants do and would do if you simply consumed them with healthy and fresh foods – completely without caffeine and acid-forming stomach irritants.
However, the power of the coffee habit combined with caffeine addiction has so gripped many people that life without coffee is simply unimaginable. Yes, they would perceive “going without” coffee as an extreme restriction of their quality of life and therefore believe that they would no longer be able to lead an enjoyable life without coffee.
However, it could be the case that some coffee lovers can no longer get rid of coffee, but still want to make their coffee enjoyment at least as healthy as possible.
And this is exactly where our six coffee tips will help:
6 tips for healthier coffee
To ensure that coffee can be drunk with the best possible conscience, various measures must be taken to minimize the harmful potential of coffee and the often catastrophic ecological and social consequences of conventional coffee cultivation.
It is important to deal with the origin of the coffee, the cultivation method, the right type of bean, and the roasting and preparation methods.
Tip 1: Buy organic coffee
Highly toxic chemicals are used in conventional coffee cultivation, including cypermethrin, diazinon, endosulfan, and parathion.
These substances pose an extreme health risk not only for the local ecosystem but also for the plantation workers in particular. It would therefore be really nice of the coffee consumer if he would take this into account when buying coffee – instead of just looking for the next best permanent low price. It is therefore best to only buy certified and fairly traded organic coffee.
Tip 2: Cold brew coffee is healthier
Prepare your coffee with cold water! As soon as the water comes into contact with coffee powder or tea leaves, the water dissolves hundreds of different substances from the starting product.
When the water is hot, this extraction happens faster and more extensively. Due to the high temperature, hot water also causes chemical reactions, which in turn can lead to the formation of new chemical compounds. At the same time, the resulting liquid loses a good part of its natural aroma.
A healthier alternative to traditional coffee is therefore coffee that has been brewed with cold water. Cold water takes more time than hot water to extract the ingredients from the coffee or tea. At the same time, the aroma is preserved.
With the cold water brewing method, you get a slightly milder but more authentic taste with significantly lower acidity. So if you’ve had heartburn or other digestive problems after drinking coffee, but still can’t do without coffee, you should try cold-brewed coffee.
In addition, cold brew coffee contains only two-thirds of the caffeine of regular brew coffee.
Cold coffee? Doesn’t sound very appetizing. But if the coffee is only brewed cold, it is of course served hot. This is how it works:
Cold brew coffee – The recipe
About 100 grams of ground coffee are mixed with 500 ml of cold water, stirred well, and left to stand at room temperature overnight.
The next day you pour the coffee through a fine sieve, then through a coffee filter. The result is a kind of concentrate that can now be stored in the refrigerator for about two weeks.
If you then want to drink a coffee, put 50 ml of your cold-brewed coffee concentrate in a cup and pour in 100 to 150 ml of hot water. It’s already ready Your hot cold brewed coffee.
Tip 3: Choose coffee with as little acrylamide as possible
Acrylamide is a carcinogenic substance that is produced when certain foods are heated, e.g. also with coffee. Therefore, the respective roasting method has a decisive influence on how high the acrylamide levels in the coffee are.
Researcher Rita Alves from the Portuguese University in Porto found that some specific types of coffee have lower levels of acrylamide. She published the results of her study in the journal Royal Society of Chemistry.
Alves and her team analyzed the acrylamide content in different espresso roasts and found that light roasts have significantly more acrylamide than dark roasts.
The type of bean also has a certain effect on the acrylamide levels it contains. For example, Robusta coffee contains twice as much acrylamide as Arabica coffee.
In summary, Alves states “that it is almost impossible to completely eliminate acrylamide from coffee without directly reducing the quality of the beverage.” As an alternative, for people who don’t want to avoid coffee, she suggests opting for Arabica coffee and making sure it’s a dark roast.
In addition, an espresso is always preferable to normal coffee, because you don’t drink as much of the espresso, which does contain more acrylamide than normal coffee, and because you drink less acrylamide, you also absorb less acrylamide. A normal espresso also contains significantly less acrylamide than the lungo version (espresso lungo), in English “extended” espresso.
Tip 4: Choose long-term roasted coffee or roast it yourself!
Coffee is imported in the form of raw coffee beans and then mostly roasted in large coffee roasters.
Depending on the final quality, the coffee is either roasted quickly within 90 seconds and at 400 degrees Celsius, or slowly (up to 25 minutes) at temperatures of a maximum of 230 degrees Celsius.
The instantaneous (“shock roast”) method results in an acidic coffee with high levels of chlorogenic acid, which upsets many people’s stomachs.
A more compatible alternative is a coffee that is slowly roasted at lower temperatures. This not only creates a better aroma but also more acid is broken down and the coffee is ultimately more digestible.
When buying coffee, look for slow-roasted coffee (coffee from long-term roasting).
Incidentally, coffee freaks who no longer trust the coffee industry at all buy raw organic coffee beans (in special online shops) and roast them themselves with a (not exactly cheap) household roasting machine.
Here you have almost everything under your own control, from the country of origin and the variety to the roasting time and roasting temperature.
Tip 5: Drink the coffee in black
The tip to drink black coffee – i.e. without sugar and milk – is also not to be scoffed at. This protects the blood sugar level, the ability to concentrate, and last but not least the teeth.
Avoiding milk also ensures that the antioxidants in coffee can actually be used, since some of them could be rendered useless by the milk.
If you like your coffee sweet, then it is best to use some xylitol or stevia tabs as a sugar alternative.
Tip 6: Season your coffee
If you also refine your coffee with health-promoting spices, these spices can of course also make your coffee healthier, e.g. B. cardamom (1), allspice (0.5), cloves (1), cinnamon (1), pepper (0.5), nutmeg 0.5) or some vanilla (0.5).
Some Arabic coffee spice mixtures also consist of the spices mentioned. The numbers in parentheses indicate the ratio in which you can mix the powdered spices together. Simply sprinkle some of the finished mixtures over your coffee or add a pinch of it to the coffee powder in the filter for each cup.
Alternative to bean coffee: delicious lupine coffee
And should you ever feel like enjoying coffee without coffee, then simply try a lupine coffee, which – in our opinion – of all coffee imitations comes closest to bean coffee.
The lupine coffee comes from German Bioland lupins, which have been gently roasted in a long-term roasting process. The resulting drink is a highly digestible alternative to coffee, which is very low in acid and yet promises highly aromatic enjoyment.
