Is Coffee Good or Bad for you?

Hey, everybody. Welcome to my weekly house call. Your chance to ask me your questions. And this week's question is. Dr. Hyman, I'm so confused about coffee. One day I read that it's so bad for me, and the next I read it's good for me. What's the truth about coffee? Well, it's a great question, but the answer is not so simple. Coffee is actually the biggest source of antioxidants in the American diet. In a recent animal study, researchers were able to see improvements in non alcoholic fatty liver, which is super common, common from eating sugar, and improvements in cholesterol when they fed mice coffee and fat together. The study also showed that coffee could help reduce gut permeability or leaky gut. Now, coffee consumption has also been associated with lowering the risk of type 2 diabetes and lowering cancer and improving mood and memory and so many other benefits. Coffee has also been known to improve metabolism and even sports performance. On the other hand, coffee is addictive. It can mess with your stress hormones, making you feel wired and tired. So this can be confusing. One study comes out in support of coffee, and the next day we see 10 reasons why coffee is bad for us. So what's the truth about this delicious aromatic beverage? Well, it's not black and white. Simply put, it's not about the coffee. It's about the person. How people respond to coffee is controlled by genetics and how that affects caffeine metabolism. One cup might have someone bouncing off the walls all day, and others can have a triple espresso and go right to bed. If someone comes to my office complaining of fatigue and restlessness and heart palpitations, would I recommend coffee? No way. The effects of coffee are not the same for everyone. For someone who's suffering from adrenal fatigue, coffee could be really bad for their health. Some individuals might also have a sensitivity to coffee beans, which means their bodies won't tolerate them, which can create a whole variety of symptoms. Now, the constituents in coffee can also interfere with normal drug metabolism and detoxification of the liver, making it hard to regulate the normal detox process in the liver. Now, one of my patients, he was drinking 12 cups of coffee a day and was constantly falling asleep at his desk and could barely function and couldn't understand why he was so tired. While tapering him off of coffee got him actually sleeping at night and not all day on his desk and feeling great. So how do you determine if coffee works for you or if it doesn't? Well, just like other potential toxic triggers, I recommend eliminating it for three weeks. Now, if you need coffee every day to feel motivated or even function, then that's coffee addiction. In this situation, there's a big chance that your stress hormones are out of whack and they need some resetting. So to wean yourself off, try switching from multiple cups to one cup and then half a cup. And then try switching to green tea or herbal teas, which with warm lemon. Be sure to drink lots of water. Get lots of rest when you give up coffee because you might be more tired than usual. But make sure you get plenty of exercise to keep your energy up. If you're irritable or having trouble sleeping, you can take magnesium citrate about 200 to 500 milligrams before bed. Some people rely on substituting coffee for real food, too. So when you're hungry, make sure to eat and don't let your blood sugar get too low. Also, have some protein in the afternoon, like a handful of nuts or seeds or almonds, pecans, walnuts, pumpkin seeds, or a piece of steamed or baked fish. Also, try relaxation techniques like sitting in a sauna or meditation or yoga, or get a massage. I like that one. Or help combat any stress through any technique you like. But just make sure you give up coffee for that period of time and see how it affects you, because you never know how you feel without it. I remember when I was in medical school, I started drinking coffee and noticed I was tired every afternoon and I never was before. And it was because I wasn't having coffee in the afternoon. I had in the morning and made me tired later. For everyone else, I want you to remove coffee for three weeks, and then I want you to add it back in. So when you do that, what happens? Do you have any symptoms? How's your energy? Any changes in digestion? Do you feel anxious? Irritable? You want to monitor how you respond to coffee? It's really important to track how you're doing and how it affects you. Now, if coffee doesn't seem to work for you, that's fine. There's lots of other things you can drink and you can enjoy, like green tea. Or you can make non coffee lattes using reishi powder and lots of great herbs. If coffee does work for you, then I recommend staying away from two additions that normally go into coffee. That's milk and sugar. Often is these two culprits that are doing more damage than the actual coffee. Instead, I recommend fat. Yes, that's the right fat blended with your coffee, also known as bulletproof coffee. And it's really one of the best ways to enjoy this beverage. Once you taste the creamy frothy goodness of fat and coffee blended together, you're not going to miss milk. Trust me. This blend of coffee has really changed my life. Now I use ghee because I have sensitivity to dairy, but you can use ghee or clarified butter butter instead of the dairy. On days where I have coffee, I blend MCT oil with a bit of grass fed ghee with high quality coffee and I notice really great benefits right away. Like my mind wakes up, I have more energy. You can use, as I said, clarified butter or ghee if you have any sensitivity to dairy because it takes out all the casein and the whey that bothers people. Now this keeps me satisfied for hours. It keeps my brain sharp. It also is the perfect beverage to enjoy before exercising because it boosts your energy for long periods of time without the crash that coffee can normally cause. Now this way of preparing coffee has kept me focused, helped me cut my cravings and I'll put a recipe from my book Effect at the end right below so you can use it. So there you have it. There's no one size fits all approach to coffee, just like there's no one size fits all approach to diet and lifestyle. One person might be able to enjoy raw cruciferous veggies and the next person might have to avoid these because they get lots of digestive problems. Same applies to coffee. Instead of saying coffee is good or bad, you need to determine if it works for you or if it doesn't. Now I want to hear from you. Does coffee work for you? Have you found that it doesn't work for you? How did you find out? So share your comments below or on my Facebook page and if you like this video, share with your friends and family on Facebook and Twitter and be sure to submit your questions to drhyman.com and maybe next week I'll make a house call to you.