A Quest To Find The Purest Coffee On The Planet (& The Shocking Truth About Popular "Organic" Coffee Beans)

Hey, what's up? It's Ben Greenfield, as you'll learn and I allude to in today's podcast interview with Andrew Salisbury, who's a coffee expert. I grew up in a pretty coffee obsessed family. My mom and dad were a little bit more coffee obsessed than the average couple. They visited destination coffee shops and designed new coffee recipes and subscribed to coffee magazines. And my dad had this vintage coffee roaster from Sandpoint, Idaho and his own coffee company. And me and my brothers would see these big trucks pull up in the driveway and deliver deliver coffee from Guatemala and Costa Rica and Tanzania. And then we'd wake to the smell of my father roasting coffee out in the hills of North Idaho. So I, by the time I was 13, was throwing back espresso shots. And at the ripe old age of 21, while I was studying at University of Idaho, I managed a coffee shop and eventually went on to, as you know, be a complete nutrition nerd. And I've used coffee and facial serums and tinctures, boosters and supplements and enemas. And I've tried just about every coffee on the face of the planet, including organic coffees and mold free coffees and smart drug infused coffees and superfood infused coffee powders with mushrooms and just about any variation of coffee that you could shake a stick at. So it probably makes pretty good sense that for about the next week I'm gonna be delivering to you a ton of killer coffee content because I'm on a coffee kick lately. As a matter of fact, it's been about the past three years that I've really focused on figuring out how I can take this daily staple that I, and I know many of my podcast listeners, enjoy every day and figure out every known strategy and tactic that you could use to make coffee healthier, from sustainable farming practices to better harvesting techniques to better production practices, to better roasting protocols, to better pack packaging strategies. And my goal over the past several years has been to not take into consideration things like cost and things like convenience, but to rather focus purely on health and purely on taste and figure out what the best coffee, the most antioxidant, rich, purest coffee on earth actually is. I've talked to a lot of natural product formulators, a lot of industry experts, a lot of people in the coffee world, and you're going to get to listen today to an interview that I conduct with Andrew Salisbury, one of the top guys I interviewed who's just as coffee obsessed as I am, who had a or has a wife who had some pretty serious health issues related to her own coffee consumption. He cracked the code on a lot of this stuff. I've been talking to him a ton over the past few months about concentrating the antioxidant and the freshness and the purity of a good coffee bean into one mighty, mighty, mighty form of coffee. So we're going to be digging into that today. Not only that, but on Saturday, a few days after this podcast comes out that you're listening to right now, I've got another podcast coming out on how to make your coffee taste really good and the best grind and the best brewing methods. So prepare yourself to learn a lot about coffee. I'm also working on a big article for BenGreenfieldFitness.com on this. So all of the show notes for today's show are I will be announcing very soon. As you're listening into the podcast, you must listen in carefully because I do have some really good show notes that I've created for today's show that you are not going to want to miss. In this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness show, you have to pick not only the coffee which is the highest in antioxidants, but the highest standards. For example, our coffee is hand picked. And the reason for that is there's so much damage that's done to the coffee bean that can create mold and fermentation. The amount of chlorogenic acid, which is what we care about, varies from crop to crop, harvest to harvest, location to location. So the first step for us was selecting. So what we needed to do is we needed to find which particular farm had the highest antioxidants for that season. So we lab tested 40 organic coffees.

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.

Power, speed, mobility, balance, whatever it is for you, that's the natural movement. Get out there.

When you look at all the studies.

Done, studies that have shown the greatest efficacy.

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Hey, it's Ben Greenfield here. And I don't think it's any secret that I am a little bit of a java junkie. I've been drinking coffee since I was 13 years old. My dad was a gourmet coffee roaster as I grew up. So I would wake up in the morning as a young man to the smell of green coffee beans being roasted at our hometown in Lewiston, Idaho where we lived kind of out in the hills up on what's called the old Spiral highway. And I would wander out to the back yard where dad had his big Diedrich gourmet coffee roaster and all manner of beans being dropped off by trucks and big pallets from Costa Rica and Guatemala and Tanzania. And I would watch my dad repair old Italian espresso machines and and be out there working and roasting coffee. And I think I was up to about 10 espresso shots a day by the time I was 13 or 14 years old. And by the time I was 15, I was an accomplished barista working in the coffee shops and drive thru coffee stands that my dad owned. And by the age of 18 while at college, I was one of those dudes in the aprons at the coffee shop flipping espresso handles and making lattes and frappuccinos and coming up with all sorts of new coffee recipes. And now I still start every day with a what I call big ass cup of coffee from my wonderful Theodore Roosevelt man in the arena emblazoned coffee coffee mug. Even when I am not drinking caffeinated coffee, so to speak, I'll still start the day with a big old cup of decaf. I'm just so enamored and in love with the taste of coffee, with what coffee does for the body, with the antioxidant potential of coffee, with all of the different cancers that coffee has been shown to have a positive benefit guarding you against to of course the cognitive aspects of coffee. And those of you who listen to this podcast can typically tell when I've had a cup of coffee versus when I haven't on a show and so much more. Well, the fact is that in this marriage and this love affair I've had with coffee for the past couple of decades, I've tried just about every coffee on the face of the planet. And I have come to a growing awareness, especially in the past few months that there are a lot, a lot of issues with coffee. I think this recent FDA announcement or it may have been the usda, I don't know, one of those Alphabet soup government agencies, they began to regulate the state of California and have them put labels on the coffee there about the potential carcinogenicity and cancer causing potential of coffee that really it piqued my attention because it really got me very interested in what is going on with coffee. What's the true story behind coffee and of late over about the Past nine months, I have connected with one of the top minds in the coffee industry, a guy who I think knows more about how to source coffee and how to find good coffee and how to ensure that your coffee is not slowly killing you more than anyone else who I've ever met in my life. And he's today's podcast guest, not surprisingly. His name is Andrew Salisbury. He has set the world record for the world's longest bungee jump, which is very interesting and which I'd love to hear a little bit more about. And he has been studying coffee for much of his life. He has a fascinating story. And so we're going to talk to Andrew today. I'm going to fill you in on what is healthy when it comes to your coffee bean selection, what is unhealthy, how to make coffee taste amazing, how to enhance the antioxidant potential of coffee, how to ensure that coffee doesn't cause cancer, but instead protects you from cancer. And a whole lot more on today's show with Andrew. So, Andrew, welcome, man.

Thank you very much.

Yeah. You hold the world record for the world's longest bungee jump.

Yes. Sign of a misspent youth.

Fill me in.

Well, I started the second commercial bungee jumping company in the US out of San Francisco, years and years ago in 88, I think it was. And after basically having that company for a number of years, I then moved down to Mexico and had an opportunity to do a jump basically sponsored by Reebok and the television company there. So it was sort of. It was something I didn't want to pass up. So it was very exciting. 3,157ft from a helicopter.

Holy cow. 3,150. How long does that take? I mean, the actual drop.

Yeah, I would probably say about 25 seconds. Full stretch, because the bungee cord stretch 421%. So it was. It couldn't stretch me. It couldn't. It needed to stretch a lot because if it didn't, it would be sort of like jumping on a rock climbing rope. It would be pretty painful. So it was. It decelerated me over in about 15, 20 seconds. Wow.

Do you still bungee jump or. Once you set the world record, you're just kind of, kind of good with that.

I think the timing was sort of. I set the world record just at the perfect time where it was starting to lose the sort of cachet and the company. There was not as many companies doing it. And I think it just, it was, it was a. It was a phase. I don't really do it anymore.

Yeah, yeah. Well, then you face. This is what I want to talk about, actually. I think it began from what I understand from the story that you've told me with your wife. Your wife, Amber, is that her name?

That's right.

Film. Fill me in on this.

Yeah, basically it was, it was the fact that my wife was experiencing some health issues, low energy, and, and at the time I wasn't a coffee drinker, I was a tea drinker, as you could probably tell by my, my, by my accent.

Tea and. Tea and crumpets and a biscuit.

Right. But. And we had quite a few arguments about it because I felt she was drinking a lot of coffee. I felt like she had one foot on the accelerator, one foot on the brake. And back then there was a lot of mixed information about whether coffee was good for you or bad for you. And it really set me down, set me on a journey to uncover what the truth was about coffee. And to be honest, I felt like I was more likely to be right than she was. And I'd read a lot of negative information about coffee and health and. But as I started to look into it, I got introduced to two professors at the Institute of Coffee Studies. And what they told me was really surprising, which is that what science knows about the health benefits of coffee and what the general public knows was two very different things. And there was a big disconnect and that information really hadn't gotten down to the general public. And that coffee is incredibly good for you.

Now, your wife was drinking a lot of coffee at the time.

Yeah, that's right.

Like we're talking lattes, frappuccinos, black coffee, white coffee.

I think like it's sort of form of self medication. She was drinking K cups probably, and it really wasn't the best coffee. It was just, you know, the big chains and K cups and that sort of thing.

Yeah, K cups are the instant coffee they get in hotel rooms, for example. Right.

It's the little pods that you get that you basically slip into the machine that creates one cup of coffee. But in a lot of cases it's, it's very low quality coffee.

Yeah. And fantastic for the environment, by the way. All those little pods. That's right. We go through thousands, hundreds of thousands per year. I don't even want to know what those K cups do to the environment. It's something that I've thought about while making myself a K cup in a Marriott, of course. But anyways, so your wife is doing a ton of these K cups. 4 to 6 K cups of coffee a day, morning latte in addition to that. And you hooked up with these folks, you said it was the Institute of.

Coffee, Institute of Coffee Studies in Vanderbilt University in Nashville.

And what is that?

So it's basically a, it's a program inside of the university to study various fields around coffee. And part of it was the, the health benefits of coffee. And, and so they were really the experts when it came, especially in the US there's some great institutions in different parts of the world, but they were really the Experts in the U.S. when to discussion on the health benefits of coffee.

Okay, so you connected with this institute and what they do primarily is coffee. They just study coffee.

That's right. That's right. And. And it's sort of part of this journey is they introduced me to Dr. Adriana Farrar, who's, I would say, one of the top coffee scientists in the world. In the University of Rio. We started working, you know, for about 18 months doing research on, on coffee and health.

So what'd you find when it comes to what, what they know in terms of the, what science knows about coffee. But people listening in might not in terms of what you, what, what the folks at Vanderbilt were studying or what you. And you said, Dr. Adriana.

Yeah. Dr. Adriana Farrar, the biggest things are this coffee is the number one source of antioxidants in the American diet. So people often think of coffee as a delivery system for caffeine, which it is, but it's also the number one source of antioxidants. And those antioxidants come from a compound called chlorogenic acids. And so that was the first thing. And second thing was it has a huge impact on various parts of the body, in particular the prevention of liver disease. So, for example, if you were to drink, for every cup of coffee you drink from the baseline, you have a 20% lower chance of ever developing fatty liver or liver cirrhosis or even, even liver cancer. So if you drink two cups of coffee and you move to three cups of coffee, there's a 20% lower chance from that additional cup of coffee. Another area that we focus on is prevention of type 2 diabetes. It's the impact of coffee on prevention of type 2 diabetes is profound. There's a very large study of 1,109,000 people, it's called the nurses study, where they were tracked over 30 years. And it shows that if you drink three to five cups of coffee a day, you have about a 45% lower chance of ever developing type 2 diabetes.

But before we get into this, this wide range of effects that coffee has on, on a whole bunch of these chronic disease risk factors, because I want to take a deeper dive into this, because I know there's, there's some very fascinating studies on longevity, on Alzheimer's, on prostate cancer, on Parkinson's, on liver disease. Coffee does have a bad rap. And that bad rap, it goes back farther than what I thought. I think it's all the way back to the 50s. I mean, you showed me some headlines from the newspapers where coffee was given a bad reputation as this unhealthy vice as early as the 1950s. What exactly happened back then that would cause people since then and even now to associate coffee with, you know, like a cigarette smoking, high risk, cancer type of scenario?

Yeah, in the early days they started in the 50s. They started looking at patterns and trying to define where the coffee was good for your health. And one of the biggest problems is they didn't sort for cigarette smoking and lack of exercise. So there was often a correlation with people who were drinking coffee and also smoking a lot. And so in the early stages when they started to look at coffee consumption, they thought that coffee caused things like lung cancer, various health issues. And it was only in the last sort of 10 to 15 years that they sorted for those bad behaviors and removed those bad behaviors from the studies and literally the findings reversed. And now we realize what a health benefit it is. But when it was lumped in with bad behaviors, people were thinking that it was the cause of all these things.

Yeah, I think that that was the USDA announcement in 2015, I think, where they, they finally came out and said that moderate coffee consumption isn't associated with the increased risk of major chronic diseases. That for a long time, you know, since those 1950s studies, a lot of people had believed that it, that it was associated with.

That's right. In 2015, 2016 was a very good year for coffee. The USDA includes it as part of a healthy lifestyle. And maybe even more importantly, the World Health Organization completely reversed its position on coffee being a possible carcinogen. Seeing, saying that it basically has an inverse effect on cancer. So in other words, it will, it reduces your risk of five different sorts of cancer.

Although to address the elephant in the room, just recently, in the past few months, California turns out to be a state that seems to, seems to hate coffee. They think the coffee is going to kill us, or at least the legislators there do. What happened with coffee in California?

Yeah, I think it's really a case of overreach here and a badly written law. Without going into too many details, I mean, Proposition 65 is a law that outlines all possible carcinogens or possible compounds that could cause cancer, even ones that really haven't been proven to cause cancer, like acrylamide, but in high enough doses, acrylamide causes cancer in mice, but those doses are pretty much, you'd have to drink about 1,000 cups of coffee a day to be able to reproduce the same negative effects. But unfortunately, the way the law is written, it is the responsibility of the coffee company to prove that your coffee doesn't cause cancer in one of 100,000 cases. And so the way the law is written, you've got a very difficult job if you're a coffee company trying to prove a negative. It's like me saying to you, prove to me there's not pixies living at the bottom of your garden. It's sort of, it's a, it's a hard thing to prove a negative.

Right. And, and the other thing I know about acrylamide is even if it, if it is in relatively minuscule amounts of coffee or in coffee, it's the roasting process, from what I understand, that can either allow the acrylamide levels to be more concentrated or less concentrated. Is that correct?

Absolutely. So acrylamide occurs in the early stage of roasting. And we've, in our roasting protocol, we've been working to minimize the amount of krylamide in coffee for the last three years. So, you know, in our coffee we have five parts per billion in a cup of coffee. So it's a, it's incredibly low, minuscule amounts. But you can, as you said, put.

That into perspective for me. 5 parts per billion compared to what would be considered high in, say, other coffees?

Well, in terms of, let's say, other things you could eat, in terms of, let's say French fries, you would probably not. Probably you'd have to drink 120 cups of our coffee to have the same impact as one large order of French fries from a large chain.

I'm game. I'll sign up for that test, see if I can do it. Yeah, maybe in a month. I think I go through 120 cups of that coffee per month, plus my big coffee mug, I think counts for about three cups, the equivalent of three cups. It's just like my big fishbowl size wine glasses. I claim that wine is good for you, but at the same time, I know that the amount has gone up dramatically based on the size of my cup or my glass. But in the case of coffee, so it was back in the 50s, coming back to what I was asking you about these 1950s studies that failed to differentiate between the effects of coffee consumption and a lot of these confounding variables that people who are drinking a lot of coffee were doing, like heavy smoking and excess alcohol consumption and lack of physical activity. So the New England Journal of Medicine and a lot of these other studies back in the 50s didn't control for that original data. Now and since 2015 and a lot of these more recent studies, that data has been controlled for. And even as late as now in 2018, some of the latest vilification activity of inst. Coffee has been based on levels of acrylamide that A, can be controlled with the proper roasting process and B, are relatively minuscule anyways compared to the acrylamide levels we're going to find in many foods. And it's essentially just poor legislation.

It's poor legislation and it leaves the door open for attorneys to make a good payday. Truthfully, that's part of the problem. It's, it's easy to file a lawsuit as if you're protecting the consumer when really you're not protecting the consumer, because unfortunately, when you put cancer warning labels on everything, even if you have a minuscule issue, it's hard for consumers to understand what to avoid and what is safe. And this is one of those cases.

Okay, now I want to dive into some of the fascinating ways that coffee can actually be surprisingly good for you. And I interviewed Dr. Sanjeev Chopra, Deepak Chopra's brother, last year. And in that interview, which I'll link to in the show notes, just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com CoffeePodcast that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com CoachPodcast and I'll put a link to that interview. In the show notes, he talks about how the philosopher Voltaire would drink 60 cups of coffee a day and the, the profound effects that coffee can have on, on a host of different chronic diseases. But you've taken, I think, an even deeper dive than Sanjeev when it comes to really looking into a lot of the health and wellness properties of coffee, that that kind of defy a lot of what we've been taught since the 50s. You mentioned how coffee is the richest source of antioxidants, richer than blueberries, than dark chocolate, than cranberries. I think about 10 times or more that of kale. I mean, it's Pretty crazy. But what about some of the other effects of coffee that go beyond the antioxidant benefits?

Well, the biggest ones, I would say the top three, the most well researched. And remember, we're looking at about. There's been about 19,000 studies done on coffee and health spanning over 40 or 50 years. So there's a tremendous amount of data. The biggest, probably most profound differences are the impact on type 2 diabetes, the lowering risk of type 2 diabetes, anything to do with liver disease. Coffee is incredibly good for the liver. So if you like an occasional glass of wine, like I do, it's definitely a good thing to be drinking the next day. And heart disease as well, mainly through to the antioxidant benefit. And as you mentioned, longevity. It's sort of surprising, but there's been a number of studies, and I hate to even mention these because they're just so. The numbers are so big, but one of the largest studies showed that you have a 20% lower risk of premature death in men at a 26% lower risk of premature death in women for people who drink three to five cups of coffee a day.

Yeah, I know. There was one study. It was in the Journal of Epidemiology. And in that one, they looked at the relationship between drinking coffee and 10 leading causes of death in the US and they showed that frequent, moderate, regular coffee drinkers had a reduction in heart disease, lower respiratory disease, diabetes, influenza, pneumonia. There was one study that showed a 65% reduction in risk of Alzheimer's, which is more than we hear about all these sauna studies over in Finland for longevity and for Alzheimer's. And when you look at the longevity studies in coffee, up to a 20% lower risk of death in men and 26% for women. And this 65% reduced risk of Alzheimer's. Of late, a lot of people have been talking about the health benefits of a sauna. And coffee nearly doubles what sauna does in terms of longevity and reduced risk of Alzheimer's. So it's pretty nuts when paired with the reduced risk of cancer.

Exactly. And what was important to look at for us was to understand where those benefits were coming from, because it wasn't coming from caffeine and it's coming from the very high level of this particular sort of antioxidant in coffee, chlorogenic acid. And so that's where we spend most of our time, trying to understand how we can increase the amount or maintain the amount of antioxidants in coffee. So you get most of that benefits.

Okay, talk to me about Chlorogenic acid and the relationship between that and antioxidants. Because I haven't really talked that much about that in articles or podcasts here before.

Yeah, chlorogenic acid is the main antioxidant or polyphenol in coffee and there are nine variations of it. But it's, but basically that's, that's the thing that the scientists understand to be the cause of most of the health benefits from coffee. There's other things going on. There's a couple of other compounds called diterpenes, di terpenes depending on where you're from, but called cafestol and kaiwal. But, but the strongest form of antioxidants in, in coffee is chlorogenic acid.

With coffee Stone Cola being the ones that would get. Well, if you were to use a paper filter, I know those get filtered out. However, if you don't use a paper filter and use a metal filter, or I use a French press, for example, because I really enjoy the taste of that. And then even more so if you blend with, and this is what a lot of people are doing, right, Blending the fat or blending the coffee with a fat like a butter or an MCT oil or coconut oil, that allows those coffee stol and kawayol compounds to cross the blood brain barrier and to enhance the cognitive performance enhancing effect of coffee. And so, yeah, they're not only really good as an antioxidant, but also if you can get them across the blood brain barrier, really, really good for cognitive performance as well.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's very right.

Now, when it comes to the antioxidant concentration, the chlorogenic acid concentration, what's the best way to actually increase the availability of chlorogen acid?

Well, there's so many different things, but it starts, I'll start with the main one. The amount of chlorogenic acids is always highest in the green bean. And then it diminishes as more things happen to that bean through roasting and through its freshness. But also the amount of CGAs in coffee vary dramatically from harvest to harvest, crop to crop, country to country, and you can't predict which coffee is going to have the highest level of antioxidants, which is one of the reasons why we lab test 40 organic coffees and pick the highest and we'll know the next season there's going to be another coffee that becomes the highest in chlorogenic acid because it's just not really predictable. So the first step is you need to find the one that is highest in antioxidants that naturally occurs in nature. And then the second thing is the roasting protocol so that you can minimize the amount of antioxidants that drop off as you roast the coffee. Because one thing most people are not aware of is the darker you roast the coffee, the more you lose the antioxidants in the coffee when it comes.

To the antioxidant levels. You referred to testing that you did because you have this company, you're researching coffee beans, you're testing coffee beans, you're finding the coffee beans that have the highest antioxidant levels, while also, from what I understand, testing relatively free of other contaminants and, and low in acrylamide content. Talk to me about the lab testing that you've done. I know you've done a lot of independent laboratory tests on different coffees for antioxidants and for contaminants. I find it fascinating and I want to delve into that because there's a lot of coffees in, in our industry, and especially our health and fitness industry, that make claims about the antioxidant content, about the contaminant content. Tell me what you found in and also the tests that you ran on coffees and coffee beans.

Yeah, so. So our situation is we had the luxury to look at this, decide that we wanted to make every decision based on, on health. And so the testing that you mentioned was we wanted to find out at the end of every step of this process, how do we actually achieve what we set out to do. And so we tested in three independent labs, one in Rio for chlorogenic acids. We also tested in the University of Lisbon in Portugal, where we were testing for acrylamide. And there's another negative content compound that's created in the later stage of roasting called PAHs, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. So we tested for that. We tested for trigonaline for caffeine content. Basically, we tested to make sure that none of the negative things that we wanted to avoid were in our coffee. And we had the most of the positive things. And finally, testing for mold, mycotoxins, yeast, and making sure that our coffee didn't have any what's called primary defects, which is that the coffee that we choose has to be the highest quality specialty grade coffee that really only one or specialty grade organic, and only 1% of the coffee worldwide meets that criteria.

So you tested against all these different coffees. I've seen the list. It's pretty comprehensive. You've got everything from Starbucks to Blue Bottle Coffee to Life Extension Coffee, Trader Joe's Coffee, Bulletproof Coffee, Cafe Sonora Coffee, Great Value Coffee, Folgers Coffee, of course, Maxwell House, Stumptown Roasters. A lot of these coffees that I see all over the place. You know, Dunkin Donuts, of course, our favorite coffee to dip a donut in. What did, what did you find when comparing this coffee that, that you're using now against these other coffees? As far as the comparison goes, the.

First thing we found is just what a wide range there was between different coffees and inside of different brands because people weren't consciously trying to sort for health, making decisions based on health. There was a huge range in terms of the health benefits of their product. But we also found that we were the number one source of antioxidants in any coffee. So we were Rated out of 49 of the top brands that we tested. And as you mentioned, we tested specialty coffee to sort of supermarkets or Folgers or just the very standard coffees. We were the number one source of antioxidants, the highest level of antioxidants of any of the coffee tested, which was great to find out after all of that work. And then the second thing is that the average was two times, up to 10 times higher in antioxidants.

And what about contaminants?

Well, depending which ones there are. So we tested for the things that we cared about. This. We wanted to make sure that our coffee had incredibly low levels of acrylamide, which we achieved no PAHs, which we also achieved no mold, no yeast, no mycotoxins, and we also achieved that. So across the board, our coffee, you know, hence the name, you know, our coffee is incredibly, incredibly pure and clean. But there's again, a huge range. Unfortunately, a lot of coffee companies are trying to cut corners because the reason why people buy coffee is either taste or they're looking for convenience or they're looking for cost. And decisions are made to meet any one of those three criterias and typically health falls by the wayside because that's not the primary driver.

Yeah, it looks like in looking over the results, and I'm going to put a link to these studies that Andrew conducted independent studies on all these different coffees over in the show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com CoffeePodcast but this coffee bean contained double the antioxidant levels of all the coffees tested, in some cases more than 10 times, four times the antioxidant levels of all the organic coffees tested. 100% mold and mycotoxin free. You didn't find any mold and mycotoxin at all in the coffee?

No, that's our standard. We won't accept any coffee that has any molds or mycotoxins to yeast, which represents poor handling of the coffee.

Does that require you to shift the source of the coffee beans based on changes in growing, changes in environmental conditions, changes in moisture exposure and things like that, based on the coffee beans that you're getting and roasting?

It does, and that's where the initial conversation was. You can't really predict where the coffee with the highest antioxidants in the green beans is going to come from. But then even if you picked a coffee that's very high in antioxidant, the green bean, depending on how it's handled through the process, you can create other problems. So you have to pick not only the coffee which is the highest in antioxidants, but the highest standards. For example, our coffee is hand picked, hand selected. And the reason for that is there's so much damage that is done to the coffee bean that create, that can create mold and fermentation when they use these big industrial standards to sort of rake the, the coffee trees, to pull all the coffee off the trees at the same time.

So you can't just get your coffee regularly from, let's say, the same Costa Rican farm or the same Guatemalan plantation and expect it to be the same year to year.

No. And, and we wanted, we wanted to choose the very best year, year to year, the highest standard. And so it's very likely that the coffee that we, that we have next season is going to be from a different region and from a different farm with a very high standard, but it will be different.

So you're tossing a little bit of the cost considerations out of the window and instead focusing primarily on the quality. And I want to get into the taste too. But you're also taking, I would assume, taste into consideration.

The funny thing is we made the decision that in the early stages that we weren't going to make any decision that wasn't based on health. So we decided we didn't care about the taste, we didn't care about the cost. I mean, truthfully, we didn't know whether we would have a pound of coffee that cost $200 and it would taste like ditch water. It didn't. We found out there was a great correlation between super high quality organic product and fantastic taste. But that wasn't our driver. We wanted to do something that we think nobody's ever done before, which is make every decision based on health.

Yes. And granted there are many healthy foods that do taste like cardboard and admittedly I still eat them anyways, but I was actually pleasantly surprised to find that you could find the sweet spot and still maximize health benefits. And as a matter of fact, this particular coffee that we're talking about, and I'm gonna put links to all these different coffee sources and these lab tests over @Ben Greenfield Fitness.com Coffee podcast is described as cocoa, English walnuts and citrus citric fruits. I believe you guys had some of the top tasting or the top. What do you call the coffee tasters? Is that just what you call them? Coffee tasters?

Q graders.

Q graders.

Q graders. And they're almost like the sommeliers of coffee. And we have specialty grade coffee, which is the very highest rating when it comes to taste and freshness. And you know, it was a happy coincidence for us and it really was a coincidence because it wasn't what we set out to do. But the happy coincidence was that by choosing health as the primary driver, we ended up with an incredibly high quality product that tasted great.

And you've got, it's basically like a three step process that you have done to achieve these, these high levels of antioxidants. And there's this ranking that beats out all the other coffees in the world, including the organic coffees based on these independent lab studies that you've done. Can you walk me through these three steps that you guys use?

Yeah. The first thing is sourcing. So you've got to start with the right raw materials. So as I mentioned earlier, the amount of chlorogenic acid, which is what we care about, vary from crop to crop, harvest to harvest, location to location. So the first step for us was selecting. So what we needed to do is we needed to find which particular farm had the highest antioxidants for that season. So we lab tested 40 organic coffees. It has to be organic. That's the next thing that I would say to any of your listeners. Coffee is the most heavily treated crop on the planet next to I think tobacco and cotton. But you're not really going to be ingesting those in the same way. And unfortunately, speak for yourself.

I personally like a good, good cigarette, cup of coffee in the morning.

That's right. But you know, the problem is that they're often treated in countries that don't have the same level of oversight. I mean, when you're in developing countries where coffee is grown, this is sort of sustenance. Farming, meaning that if you're, if your crop doesn't come in, your family doesn't eat. And so there's not the same level of oversight in terms of the quality of the herbicides, pesticides and standards. And there's no sort of, there's no sort of rules or regulations as that coffee comes into the country, what, what products have been used on it. So I mean, if there's one thing I would stress is the coffee needs to be organic and it needs to be specially grade coffee, which means the very highest standard of coffee. And the reason for that is every, what's called a defect. But what, what takes a coffee from being the very best to any one of the, the levels below that are typically things that can affect the health benefit of the coffee. So the things like insect damage or mold or yeast on the coffee or over fermentation or cracked or broken beans. And so we, we insist on this sourcing profile that it has to be the highest grade organic coffee. And then obviously we lab test for mold at every step of the process. So that's, that's probably the first step is, is sourcing, making sure we're, we're starting with the very best products.

And you're using independent lab tests to test for, I believe, over 60 different types of mold, right?

That's right. 65 different soaps of mold.

The one thing that you also do that surprised me, it reminds me of how when my kids are cooking, I tell them to uniformly chop and cut, for example, the carrots, the cucumbers, even the pieces of meat. So we get really even coating of the marinade and the spices and a really even cook time on the surface area of all the different components of the food that we're cooking. You told me that even the coffee beans, you test the coffee beans to make sure or you, you review them to make sure they're not chipped enough to risk an uneven roast.

That's right. That's actually very smart advice that you gave, the reason for that. And as I said, you know, we only do things if they have a health reason behind them. The reason why chipped or broken beans, you don't want to include them or we don't allow them to be included in our standard coffee. And there's a test for that. Once they reach specialty grade coffee, it means that they don't have chipped or broken beans in the coffee. And the reason why it's important is that when you roast coffee, if your bean is chipped or broken, a chipped bean is likely to char because it's smaller and it's going to char quicker. And so that's going to create this PAHs in your coffee, which is something that we don't allow at any level. So the chips or broken beans actually create an uneven roast in the coffee and create charring, basically.

Okay, so you've basically got your sourcing where you're using the healthiest green coffee beans that you can find and always organic, even though less than 3% of the coffee on the planet is organics. But you're hunting that down, grabbing coffee beans that have near zero defects and independent laboratory testing them for mold and also ensuring they're grown sustainably and hand picked and hand selected so we're not destroying the ocean with, with K cups. And then tell me about the roasting process and how you're doing things like decreasing acrylamide. And I'm also interested, by the way, for you to fill me in on the caffeine content of the coffee itself, because a lot of people are concerned about, you know, high caffeine, low caffeine, you know, the potential for adrenal exhaustion if they're drinking a lot of coffee. So fill me on the roasting process and also about the. The caffeine content.

Yeah, so the roasting. So a lot of these decisions up to this point were relatively obvious decisions. If you're making some make a decision with health as the only driver. Organic is a natural one. Specialty grade is relatively obvious. You don't want any mold in your coffee. That's obvious. The roasting protocol, however, took really some brilliant minds, particularly with professor in Rio, Adriana Farrar, who developed a roasting protocol for coffee. Basically, the idea is this, as you roast coffee, so coffee starts in its highest form, the highest amount of antioxidants when it's green. And as you roast the coffee, you're going to start to see the antioxidants drop off. But in the very early stages of roasting, you create acrylamide. And that's what Proposition 65 is all about. So the lightest roasted coffee also has the highest level of acrylamide. And so what we needed to do is we needed to find the sweet spot where as the roasting, you carry on roasting, basically the antioxidants will drop off in the coffee. And you also have a thing called PAHs that we talked about. What we tried to do is define what the purity ratio was, which is the least amount of acrylamide and the most amount of antioxidants in the coffee. So part of our process is when a new harvest comes in, we have to test the roast curve of the coffee and make sure we pull out basically the samples at every 15 seconds. And we lab test those samples to make sure that we've hit the exact right spot for the most amount of antioxidants and the least acrylamide.

And this medium roast, it's kind of about a medium roast that I know your coffee winds up at. Surprisingly, you get that increase in antioxidant and you get the decrease in the CGA and the acrylamide, but you also get coffee that is not. It doesn't give you a jittery effect. Like I mentioned, for a very long time, much of my life, I've switched to decaf quite regularly to kind of get myself off of the caffeine tolerance that builds up from some of these high caffeine, very dark roasted, kind of muddy coffees. And your coffee is actually somewhat low in caffeine content. So I can actually drink that without getting quite as much of a buildup of caffeine tolerance.

Yeah. And I think part of it as well, I mean, this is all anecdotes and you know, what our customers are saying. And it's not something that we. It's very difficult to define. But so people find with our coffee that they can drink it, whereas before they couldn't drink other coffees. And a lot of this is, I think, due to the fact that people are intolerant of the bad stuff in coffee, which is the first thing is the pesticides, the mold that exists in coffee. And the other thing, which is the really big driver for feeling bad on coffee, is the fact that most people are drinking stale coffee. Most of the coffee you drink, especially in the large chains, was roasted five, six months ago. That's part of their supply chain. And you're drinking stale coffee. So the oils on the beans have turned rancid. And that's part of the problem.

How fresh is this coffee that I'm using now from you?

It will have been roasted within three days.

Okay. Wow.

One of two things. So we knew that the issue in freshness was, was super important for us, that we needed to make sure that the coffee was as fresh as possible. So we did two things. We deliver fresh roasted coffee. So it's delivered within three days of roasting. But even if you want to open the bag for two weeks or a month, each bag is nitrogen flushed. And what that does is that that means that the coffee is fresh. Until you open the bag and it doesn't start to stale until you open the bag.

Now when it comes to the freshness of the coffee, I want to throw in a few tips here for people because I've learned a, a lot about coffee from Andrew, you know, my dad, you know, my interview with Sanjay of Chopra and a lot of people in the industry. And for example, I mentioned that I use a French press. My wife actually uses a paper filter, but she uses a really good organic paper. She uses a Wilfa coffee maker which makes a really smooth filter. But I would tell people, first of all, use a chemical free paper filter and especially if you want to. So here's the deal. A lot of people are concerned about some of the coffee stol and the Kawaols and the cholesterols in coffee. I think only people with familial hypercholesteremia have to worry about that much. But ultimately the paper filtration process can filter out some of the cholesterols in the coffee and in my opinion it removes some of the flavor. But either way, if you're a paper filter person, use a chemical free paper filter and travel with one. If you're at hotels or Airbnbs that have the regular paper filters, travel with this coffee and travel with like a good paper filter. The next thing that, that I'd mentioned is that I used to keep coffee in the refrigerator or in the freezer and that actually introduces a lot of moisture into the coffee that through, through condensation can basically affect the taste. And so you keep the coffee the same way as you would keep like a fish oil or a vitamin, away from moisture and heat and direct sunlight and oxygen and other odors. You want like an opaque airtight container for your coffee or a really good bag, you know, like a vacuum sealed bag. And then the last thing I should mention is that you never grind it in advance. As convenient as that is. Like ideally you grind it right before you brew it. And I found that to even, and you know, do a really, really good job maximizing the flavor of these coffee beans. Andrew.

Yeah, that's right. It's, it's, it's, it's something that most people are not aware of, which is the sailing of coffee because it doesn't have the same sort of obvious signs of staling that other food has. But, but it does stale and the antioxidants drop off pretty rapidly after about 15 to 20 days after the coffee is ground. So I mean of all the effort and work that we've gone through to maintain and make sure you're. Your coffee is high in antioxidants. The staling parts at the very last part of the chain could really affect the benefit of the coffee.

Yeah. And whether you're using a home brewer, like a paper filter home brewer or a French press, or an Aeropress, which I know is really popular, or some of these other fancier coffee makers, what I'm going to do for you guys listening in, I'll put some brewing guide notes and some links to a helpful brewing guide that I'll create over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Coffee Podcast if you want to know more about some of those brew tips that I just talked about. Okay. So, Andrew, once you ran all these studies on the coffee, you found the right way to source it organically to reduce mold, you found the right way to roast it. Were there any other steps in this process to ensure that you really do have the healthiest and freshest possible coffee in terms of your packaging or anything along those lines?

I think high quality packaging, that's very important, the oxygen barrier, because even though we're flushing the bag with nitrogen, you know, if there's, if it doesn't have a good oxygen barrier, then you're going to lose the freshness that way. But I think that's the final step. The final step is we needed a delivery system that would mean that the coffee was got into your hands just after it was roasted. And so that's why, you know, our sales are all online and, you know, just to guarantee that level of freshness.

Okay, so you've got all of these different protocols that you put the coffee through to get to the final bean. Now I've been talking to you, like I mentioned for, it's been over a year now that we've been discussing this coffee and we recently decided to partner up and figure out a way for me to actually take this same coffee I've been drinking. Take this high end kind of like small batch coffee that you figured out how to roast and how to produce with the high antioxidant content, the low acrylamide content, and the fresh flavor of English walnuts and cocoa and citrus fruits, as the coffee sommeliers say. What'd you call them again? The sommeliers?

Q graters.

Q graders. Yes. And we decided to make this available to everybody listening in. As a matter of fact, what I am now doing with my company, Kion, is partnering with Andrew to actually produce this coffee and make it available to you. And so you can go read up on this coffee and all the studies that Andrew did on it over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com CoffeePodcast but perhaps even more importantly, if you want to start to drink it, this is the only coffee that I am drinking now, aside from the massive amount of K cups that I go through at the Marriott. I'm just kidding. I travel with this coffee now. It goes in my bag. I do grind it before I travel, so that's the one rule that I break just because it's hard for me to sometimes grind it when I travel and I don't travel with one of those hand crank grinders. But aside from that, it's the coffee I travel with, it's the coffee I drink now. It's the coffee my wife drinks. It's the only coffee that you find in our house. And it's called no surprises here. Kion Coffee. K I o N Kion Coffee. And what I'm doing is making this available to everybody listening in. And I've never really made this announcement before. This is a first. But I've always wanted to produce my own coffee and I wanted coffee that had independent lab tests behind it. I wanted coffee that did not have mold and mycotoxins, which I a shocking amount of the organic coffees on the market do. But even more importantly, a coffee that isn't burnt, a coffee that's roasted for moderate caffeine levels, but more importantly, really high antioxidant levels and really great taste. And I wanted to partner with a coffee expert who actually knows this stuff because I don't have time to fly to Guatemala and Costa Rica myself and look into everything from sustainable processing to the packaging to the actual content of the coffee itself. So Kion Coffee is what this is called. K I o n Kion Coffee. It's very, very simple to get. You can either go to the show notes over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com Coffee podcast or you can go to GetKion.com Coffee that's getK I-O-N.com Coffee I've got a coupon code set up for you and again, I'll put this in the Show Notes as well. You get 10% off any order, anytime, rest of your life if you want it. The Coupon code is BEN Coffee that gets you 10% off. You can also get 25% off if you want to subscribe for monthly delivery, which is a slammin deal. Same code works. Ben Coffee that gets you 10% off of any order of the coffee. Gets you 25% off of a monthly subscription to the brand new antioxidant rich, completely mold free, incredibly flavorful Kion coffee that I've partnered with Andrew to bring to you. So Andrew, any other things to share with folks about this coffee or anything else you want to throw in there?

I would just say this one thing. I'm very passionate about the conversation of coffee and health. And the reason I'm passionate about it is that, that it's one of the smallest adjustments that you can probably make in your diet with the biggest impact. I mean, as you know Ben, when you look at this sort of list of the health benefits of coffee and you can see that, you know, with just some real care and focus on how to maximize the health benefits and minimize any of the negative things, you really could have a very small adjustment in your diet that have a profound impact. And it's, you know, with 165 million people drinking coffee every day, this is something that could do a lot of good. And so, you know, I feel like the more people know about this, the better all our health will be.

And how's your wife doing now by the way? I didn't even ask you that or let people know about that.

Yeah, no, very well, very well. And I suppose that really does bring me full circle to this. I mean we don't really know what in the end caused it. We did a lot of different things in terms of supplements and all the sort of tests you could think of, mold remediation. But the one thing that we both say now is this was the easiest adjustment that she made in her diet. So it's, you know, of all the things that we were suggested to do and changing her supplements, you know, and just, you know, exercising more and drinking less and all the different things, the easiest shift in her diet was focus on quality coffee.

Amazing. Amazing. Well, I, as a self professed coffee junkie, a guy who has spent a lot of time in this industry, this is probably one of the highlights of my year to be able to launch my own coffee based on everything that you and I have just discussed, Andrew. And if you're listening in right now again just go to getkion.com Coffee to get Kion Coffee. That's K-I-O-N getkion.com Coffee code Ben Coffee gets you 10% off any order, 25% discount if you want to subscribe for monthly delivery. And it is the exact coffee bean that I'm drinking now and that Andrew has helped me to discover. So Andrew, thanks for coming on the show, man, and keeping us all, keeping us all safe while still able to consume this, this amazing mind altering and health promoting compound.

Absolutely. Well, thanks. Thanks for having me on the show.

All right, folks. Well, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Andrew Salisbury signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing coffee fueled week.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

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