Black Coffee: Why You Should Rather Avoid Milk

Many people enjoy their coffee with a dash of milk. According to recent findings, black coffee would be the clearly healthier option. In this health tip, we explain why you should avoid milk in your coffee.

Coffee – with milk, it loses an important property

Coffee is not only tasty but also a healthy drink.

• Coffee is not only a proven and recommended remedy for constipation.
• Drinking coffee stimulates an important cell process in the body – autophagy.
• Autophagy is the process in cells that breaks down certain components. Such components can be either damaged proteins or whole cell bodies. The breakdown products are recycled by the cell.
• So, autophagy is a recycling program important to cellular health. The Japanese Yoshinori Ohsumi even received the Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery of this self-cleaning mechanism.
• Black coffee has been shown to stimulate this autophagy. Which substance in the drink is responsible for this has not yet been proven. It is assumed that certain phytochemicals, the polyphenols, trigger the autophagy process.
• It’s definitely not the caffeine. So it doesn’t matter if you drink caffeinated or decaffeinated coffee – as long as you avoid the milk.

Milk slows down the autophagy process

The bad news for all friends of latte and cappuccino: the positive effect of coffee in terms of cell self-cleaning is lost when you drink a latte.

• However, this only applies to cow’s milk. The animal protein in milk is responsible for the autophagy-inhibiting effect. More specifically, the culprit is the amino acid methionine.
• If you use plant-based milk such as almond milk, this does not slow down autophagy.
• On the contrary: soy and wheat contain vegetable proteins that even stimulate autophagy.