How To Consume Coffee For Maximum Health And Vitality | Ronan Oliveira

Coffee is more or less like the force. You can use it to give yourself more power, or it can turn against you and turn you into a slave. The main difference is about how much, how often, and when you drink it. And I want to show you how to master your coffee before it masters you. My name is Ronan, and the first time I had a cup of coffee, I was four years old. I am not kidding. So I needed to master this art because I wanted to maximize the benefits and minimize the detriments, the possible detriments. And there is a way I want to show you how. But first things first. My intention with this video is not to convince you to drink coffee if you don't, or to convince you to stop drinking coffee if you do. I know it's a controversial topic, and these days people seem to really like holding a strong opinion either for or against coffee, because it can be both good or bad. From a scientific standpoint, we don't have an analysis of all data that says, hey, it turns out that coffee is good, everyone should have, or coffee is bad that no one should have. It's about a choice of whether you want to have the cons, the pros and cons of coffee. So this video is, if you drink coffee, then I want you to know how to maximize the benefits, how to minimize the detriments, and how to navigate this in between. The first thing that is important is that coffee goes way beyond caffeine. There's a lot of compounds, a lot of polyphenols in coffee that work as antioxidants. In fact, coffee is the main source of antioxidants. It represents more or less 79% of all the antioxidants in a western common diet. In Finland, 64% of the antioxidants that they get come from coffee. In Japan, this number is 50%. This means two things. One, we all need more vegetables and fruit. Second is that coffee plants probably plays a very important role in the longevity. And why is this important? Some of these polyphenols, for example, they help slow down the absorption of glucose after a meal, and this decreases our risk for things like diabetes type. Two, we have even data showing that people who have more or less 3 to 4 cups of coffee per day have a significant lower chances of having diabetes type 2. There is also a really, really strong correlation between coffee consumption and lower risks of liver disease. For people who drink more or less 5 cups of coffee per day, the likelihood of getting liver disease or even liver cancer can get lower to 80%. There's also a different, interesting side benefit to coffee that is about hydration. That goes against the common belief. The common belief is, hey, but coffee dehydrates you. It has a diuretic effect. It does if you take in really big quantities. But it turns out that when we started observing this effect with studies, we found that, you know, people have coffee with a lot of water in it, so it dehydrates you by this bit, but it hydrates you by this bit, so the net result is still positive. Of course, water is better if you're not hydrating optimally. First, you need to wake up. Drinking water is one of the easiest upgrades to your health and your state of being. But you don't need to be afraid of coffee because it's not really dehydrating you more than it is hydrating. But this benefit is not why we drink coffee. You know, no one comes and says, I need to give my body some antioxidants. Let's get another double shot Americano. We get coffee because of caffeine. That is the active compound that gives more brightness to our life. And when I studied how to maximize the benefits of coffee, I found out that it's more or less like, I will tell you what I mean, but let's just first look at how caffeine works with the brain. You know, when your neurons are working, they produce a chemical called adenosine that is showing how much work they have been doing. It's more or less like if your neurons were powered by batteries, and when they run out of energy, they throw away the empty batteries. And the brain is monitoring the amount of batteries or adenosine to know when to rest. And to do this, the brain has adenosine receptors. Imagine this as if you have around the brain a hundred little trash cans where the neurons dump the empty batteries. When those trash cans get full, the brain detects that a lot work has been done. And so it makes you sleepy, so you can rest and recharge your batteries. But caffeine, the molecule of caffeine, has a very similar shape to adenosine. So it covers those trash cans while they are still empty. So let's say in the beginning of the day, you had a cup of coffee. That amount of caffeine was enough to to cover 50 out of your 100 trash cans. Now, it takes longer for the brain to realize that a lot work has been done. So this is what gives you that sensation of alertness. But if you keep on drinking coffee every day, at some point, the brain realizes that Something is weird and it makes more adenosine receptors. It is as if the brain order, you know, 50 more trash cans. So now you have 150 in your brain. Next day, the coffee that you drink managed to cover 50. Now you have 100 that are now working to signal the brain that you are tired. So now you are back to the beginning. After drinking one cup of coffee, now you need two cups of coffee to steal a lot. And this is when this cycle gets tricky. If you keep drinking more coffee, the brain starts to produce more adenosine receptors. And now you reach a point that you are drinking coffee not to feel great, but you're drinking coffee. Because if you don't, you feel like a zombie. What if you stop drinking coffee at that time? No, God, no, God, please, no. No. First thing is that you suffer. You know, your mind will feel sluggish and sleepy and give you a headache because now you are out with 150 or 200 trash cans that a lot more devices that signal your body that you are tired faster. But after a couple of days, the brain also realizes that something's weird there, and it removes the extra adenosine receptors and brings you back to your original state. Now you have your back to a hundred trash cans with your adenosine receptors back to the original level. And if you drink coffee, then now it powers up your day once more. Now you are expanding or maximizing the benefits you get from it. So the first important thing here about coffee is how often you have it. Every three to four weeks, you gotta let it go. You gotta take a break for more or less one week. We don't have exact numbers because all this scientific research is so far done with mice. But it seems that between one and two weeks without any caffeine. So that means no coffee or no tea, black or green tea, because they also have caffeine. It's enough time to reset the amount of adenosine receptors. In this time, what you can do is to have decaf coffee, because decaf coffee still gives you some of the benefits that comes from the polyphenols and the antioxidants without the caffeine. The second aspect here is how much coffee should you have in a day? And most of the research that shows all the longevity benefits of coffee show that up to five cups a day, five normal cups a day, is where you maximize all the longevity benefits. But then comes the third point that is the most important one, because it's the one that you need to master for coffee. Not to master you, that is, when you drink coffee, you know you don't want to drink coffee too early, and you also don't want to drink coffee too late, especially after more or less 2pm because one thing that we know is that people metabolize coffee in different ways, different paces. Some people are very fast, some people are very slow, and there's a lot of genetic coding behind that. But it takes more or less six, up to 12 hours for the concentration of caffeine to decrease in the bloodstream. So that means that if you drink coffee at 2pm, maybe up until 10pm, you may still have quite a bit of caffeine in your bloodstream. Why is that important to know? It's because when caffeine has a big concentration in your bloodstream, that impairs your sleep. There are two main things that may happen. One of them is that increases your sleep latency. That is the amount of time that it takes for you to fall asleep. The second thing is that it wakes you up naturally, even without alarm clock, earlier than you would have if you didn't have as much caffeine in your bloodstream. This may lead to losing one or more cycles of sleep. When you sleep at night, you have more or less five cycles. And losing one cycle of sleep because you now woke up earlier naturally may decrease your cognitive abilities in the next day by one third. It's a big impact in the way your brain works the next day, and you may even feel more tired, and that leads to more coffee consumption than the next day. So what you want to do here is have a coffee curfew after 2pm is a really good time to avoid any type of caffeine, because disrupting your sleep not only brings a negative impact to your brain function the next day, but it can also compound into negative health effects in the long term. The second thing is that you don't want to have coffee too early, because when you wake up, your body increases its own production of cortisol. And Dr. Michael Bruce, who is a PhD in the science of sleep and helps thousands of people to optimize their energy by optimizing their sleep, says that you need to give the body the opportunity to raise cortisol naturally in the morning. If you have coffee too early, you know within 90 minutes of waking up, you're taking the body's place of producing cortisol. You're interrupting a bit of that pattern. And so you see that after the coffee wears out, you feel tired in the beginning of the afternoon. So first let your body produces and Wakes itself up with the first 90 minutes and then after that you can have coffee. So you end up with a window of 90 minutes after you wake up until before 2pm to have all the coffee that you think you want and you think you need to maximize its own benefits. To summarize, if I want a way to remembering it, imagine that you go on a date with coffee. You know, caffeine likes to flirt. It's not up for a committed relationship. So if you have coffee here and there, eventually, at the right times, it brightens up your life. But then if you get too excited and you want coffee every day and every time and you start texting, then you lose its power. And now you know, we don't get benefits anymore. This is the time that you need to look at caffeine and say, hey, we need a break. You know, you take a break of one week every three weeks to a month and a bit of social distancing and you're back to the game. Now next time you have coffee, you get all the power again. If you're interested in mastering your energy beyond the use of coffee and figuring out different ways that you can use your body to expand, express more of different parts of yourself, we have a lot of courses at mindvalley that are only connected to different aspects of the body. Nutrition, exercise, sleep and energy and all these things. So I'm gonna leave you a link that goes straight to a page where you can find all the things that connect on how to master your body and all the programs that you have. If you still have the question, you know, I won't have coffee after 2pm, but what happens if I feel tired at 3pm? What can I do? Well, there are other things that you can do with your body to power through the day, to recharge your batteries. And this is what I'll bring you in the next video. So if you like videos like this, subscribe. If you have any comments or questions around coffee, please leave them in the comment section below and I'll comment. Keep this conversation with you. I see you in the next video.