Coffee's hidden health benefits | James Hoffmann and Prof. Tim Spector

Well for many years we thought coffee was bad for us but this is a health drink you can reduce heart attacks by 25% does the way in which you make your coffee have a big impact on the health benefits yes uh a [Music] lot James is now sniffing it like exactly what I would expect from a wine off ficado wine tasting whiskey Everyone likes a slurp suck it in mix it with the Oxygen of all the food and drink associations the one that pops up every single time was a microbe that is associated with coffee

this microbe called lenaa it's all around us produces these chemicals that have been shown to welcome to Zoe science and nutrition where World leading scientists explain how their research can improve your health hello I'm your host Jonathan wolf founder and CEO of Zoe today we Rev how Selecting the right coffee could improve your health espresso instant Aeropress cold brew decaf the list of coffee options is endless but which chemical compounds hold the secret to coffee's health benefits and how many are in your cup of coffee today we're joined by world-renowned coffee expert James Hoffman who

set up a mini laboratory right here in our studio to help us investigate alongside James is my scientific co-founder at Zoe Professor Tim SP ctor Tim is going to share groundbreaking findings from his brand new scientific study on coffee's impact on our health James Hoffman is the best-selling author of how to make the best coffee at home and Tim is one of the world's top 100 most cited scientists and a professor of epidemiology at Kings College London James and Tim thank you for joining me today happy to be here I think that you probably know

that we' Like to start with a quick fire round of questions okay a yes or a nowhere if you absolutely have to a one sentence you up for it yes all right I'm going to start with you Tim as you know I don't actually drink coffee but if I started to drink coffee could that reduce my risk of heart disease absolutely James is instant coffee unhealthy no Tim if I want to improve my gut microbiome could drinking coffee help yes James is it true that the Darker the the more caffeine in the coffee this's disagreement

T and finally Tim are you going to share the results of a brand new research study on coffee with us today maybe if you're if you're nice to me if I'm really nice we'll see hi I hope you're enjoying listening to James and Tim's fascinating insights into the health benefits of coffee we want this podcast to reach as many people as possible as we continue our Mission to improve the health of millions seeing this show grow is what motivates the whole team at Zoe to keep up the hard work of creating new episodes each week

and the best way to get YouTube to show this podcast as someone new is if you click the Subscribe button right now so if you're enjoying this episode please hit subscribe and make sure to turn notifications on thank you and back to the show brilliant okay very interesting To get into that and and um look James and Tim it's fantastic to have you back on the podcast and this time in person and a few of our listeners who have been uh with Zoe on the podcast from the very beginning will know that this is actually

the second time yes you've come on the show but the vast majority of listeners will not have uh heard uh heard you before because it was at the very very beginning but for those who have been uh listening before don't Worry because this time we are in for a treat because James has brought in some amazing Tech technology and we're actually going to be doing some science here in the studio and therefore understand some more about what's really going on inside a cup of coffee and we also have a second really fun thing which is

that I know that Tim has been working on a brand new peer-reviewed paper about the health benefits of coffee uh so I'm really excited to hear About this but before we get into into either of those things can we actually just start right at the beginning with with James like why we also obsessed with coffee uh that's a good question um it's delicious and I think it's it's um you know caffeine plays a massive role inevitably it's the world's most popular psychoactive drug uh but I think coffee's sort of woven its way into our cultures

all over around the world in different ways uh the US has a very Different Coffee Culture to the UK to Italy to Australia or Scandinavia I I I think we enjoy the feeling of drinking coffee but I I think we enjoy the act the sociability or the ritual or the break or all of those things of drinking coffee and hopefully it's good for us and Tim what are the health benefits that um these people might be receiving what are the things what are the key things in coffee that sort of could be affecting this well

for many years we Thought coffee was bad for us because short term it increases your heart rate increases your blood pressure for decades people said this is a rather dangerous thing to be having don't do too much of it you're going to have heart attack then they started doing some proper studies and have shown that you actually um based on over 25 studies you can now see a reduction of about 25% in your risk of a heart attack or heart disease so then you're saying why would That be you something that shortterm might be slightly

stressing your system is actually long-term good for you and I think it's seeing as coffee as this hole coffee as this fermented plant that act has microbes acting on it has hundreds thousands of chemicals produced from it and it's probably a combination of all those things that gives it this health benefit such as the fiber in it and we used to think uh not think of coffee as a Fiber uh drink but we now know that broadly you can get about uh 1.5 grams of fiber out of a cup which means if you're having three

cups a day that's um you know 4.5 to five grams of fiber which you know it's a quarter of your daily fiber intake in the in in the UK and the US I always find extraordinary because I always somehow in my mind think about fiber as being like like this roughage that you can't like bran exactly or like you know the stuff that My grandmother you know might stir into a glass of of water yeah and two cups of coffee is more than a banana in terms of fiber but but the point is it's a

drink so like where 's all that I don't you know where's all the solid bits of of fiber and this is because my understanding fiber isn't quite right is that well that's right well fiber can be in drinks and and can be see small particles that are still going to have a similar effect when they reach the lower Part of your intestine where all the gut microbes are and there are soluble fibers and they are insoluble fibers and you know they may be some of them might be invisible so I think that's the way actually

dissolved into the drink so there can be fiber and something you can't even see which is we always think about like it's just like eating spinach or something but actually is not like that and there are lots of different ways uh that we can get fiber into our Body and until recently we didn't appreciate this and it's not in most nutrition textbooks as you know a health drink uh but there's more fiber you know generally in coffee than an equivalent amount of orange juice for example so um it's not sufficient I'm not saying you can

live just on coffee and have a good and have a good diet but given that you know in the west we're very fiber deprived it's actually perhaps the thing that's just keeping us going on this Very low fiber diet and making up you know perhaps a quarter of a third of our um of our fiber amounts so it's the fiber it's also these individual chemicals that we're still just getting to understand and uh this range of polyphenols that are in the Coffee Bean some of them are ex enh Ed by the microbes as they ferment

it and those are released and those have Direct effects on our on our body and some of them can reduce blood sugar and uh Reduce stress and uh actually reduce blood pressure and things like this so it's uh it's a complex area but I think we're suddenly putting it together from a from a drink that was demonized as being very harmful to us to something that actually could be beneficial and the other interesting thing is we always thought it was about the caffeine and the studies have now clearly shown that you get nearly as much

benefit on the heart with decaffeinated Coffee and again it comes back to this idea of how we see Foods is we was thinking there one thing coffee is all about caffeine and you know lemons is about vitamin C and we forget everything else but clear all these other stuff going on in that food that can give us these these huge benefits and we all react very differently to caffeine and that's a whole other um series of events men women uh whether you're on the contraceptive pill whether you're Drinking alcohol whether you're having broccoli at the

same time as it all kinds of things can influence how the caffeine in the coffee uh is having an effect on you people are Sleep Experts tend not to be as keen on coffee as the two of you because what they see is the impact of caffeine on sleep and that poor sleep has these terrible um uh Health intake so they vary it might experience between you should never ever drink coffee whatsoever because like That's terrible to okay you can have coffee but you know you need to cut it off at midday or something depending

upon your sleep so what you're saying is that I've got it wrong around have youim so the things that affect coffee metabolism so the speed of which coffee is broken down therefore it doesn't hang around and keeping you awake or has this effect on your body uh it's reduced by alcohol so coffee metabolism is reduced uh bio said it lasts longer uh but it's SP sped up by vegetables like broccoli so but it's something like broccoli Sprouts which are even higher in uh s yeah that would be even better yes it's in general if you're

having a lot of vegetables that's going to uh have that effect so if I'm like over wild and can't go to sleep I eat a big plate of broccoli a lot of and then suddenly I'm going to fall asleep and and if any listeners feel it doesn't work they canite and have a cigarette You can also have a cigarette that is also good so that's why cigarette smokers actually need more coffee to get that same caffeine hit so to be clear we are not in fact promoting that you should have a cigarette but you are

saying that just demonstrating how chemicals and all food and things we eat and drink are all chemicals but what you are saying actually is that if you are a smoker the coffee doesn't work as well is this why you need more coffee in Order to get the coffee to work because yeah you're G to probably have twice as much coffee to have the same caffeine hit uh if you're non than if you're a nonsmoker and that's in males uh actually if you're females the metabolism is generally lower so caffeine has a longer effect on the

body uh and it's and also if you on the contraceptive pill it also uh increases it um further so metabolism has decreased so it lasts even longer so Females on the contraceptive pill even a small amount of caffeine can really have a last a long time can be counteracted by smoking and broccoli so just showing you that it's really interesting how everyone is different again it comes back to this personalization and you know not only in taste but also the effects of these uh these these chemicals and that's just one of the chemicals we're talking

about I think it's the it's the great Frustration of coffee conversation is the the substitution of coffee and caffeine you know it's this incredibly well studied drug we know a lot about caffeine but it's not all that coffee is but it ends up being all that we talk about most of the time when people want to talk about coffee and health do we understand why coffee is full of not only caffeine but all of these other polyenals what's that um most of us think about coffee as being either Something ground that we buy from our

grocery store or maybe we think about it as like this like blackened thing that looks a bit like a bean but we definitely don't think about it as as a plant or anything else what what's the the the caffeine's easier to sort of understand the presence of it's It's primarily produced by the coffee uh in the coffee fruit so coffee beans grow in sort of a a cherry it's about the size of a small grape with two peanuts like Seeds in the middle so if you look at a coffee bean there two flat sides they

would typically face each other um as a defense mechanism the plant produces caffeine to act kind of as an insect repellent for one of a better term uh to discourage insect attacks on the fruit that's that's really why it's there in the quantities that it is therefore you tend to see species of coffeee that are harder and more robust um one of which is robuster grows lower more insects are Present twice the caffeine levels of something like Cafe Arabica which grows higher up and obviously has less Challenge and so it needs less defense but yeah

that's that's the primary um reason cavine exists cavine is produced by other plants yeah tea leaves as well so I mean green things that I mean not green more the black tea ones for the same reasons yeah and there's another argument that some flowers produce caffeine and it's one of those sort of Situations where everything becomes crabs in that uh different uh plants through different Pathways have ended up producing caffeine almost for different purposes there was one study that showed caffeine improved be memory and so things like orange uh flowers produce caffeine uh and that's

the speculation in that it improves the sort of quality of pollination as a result the bees can find their way back to the uh fler which I think is kind of got addicted to the Caffeine and it worked that and polyphenols themselves are also what I understand defense chemicals is how I've heard you and others describe them Tim yeah this is again it's an incredibly broad family but in general these are these are chemicals produced by plants to defend themselves not only against insects but it might also be against uh high winds or could be

cold or it could be strong sunshine or uh you know it could be to change uh the way Predators You know know the taste and things that for pro Predators but generally it's a it's a defense mechanism for plants that ends up having a side effect of being beneficial for art our gut microbes that's how Nature has has has come this full circle now I know Tim you know you teased us a little bit but you have got a really exciting new paper MH can you tell us a bit about it okay uh I give

you a little teaser anyway so it's still under peer review Uh hasn't come out yet but this is work they' been doing with uh fantastic Nicholas sagata in trento and his team there plus with the 40,000 uh plus the Zoey samples so people have been giving their stool samples and we've been comparing them with their drinking habits and their food habits and now we've got this this huge sample both in the US in the UK and we've actually looked at other populations around the world we found that of all the food and Drink associations that

we linked up from our questionnaire to the microbes the one that comes top of the list that pops up every single time was a microbe that is associated with coffee it's amazing so literally the thing that we could most clearly have a one-on-one relationship between bacteria and food was that's your drink exactly it's like a forensic test you know rather than doing questionnaires you just take a bit of that St sample you take you extract The DNA and you find this microbe called Len aacta named after Dr Lon and it is inevitably linked to uh

the consumption of coffee and that uh was so strong it was you know we had this list of all these other ones and many of the foods are all mixed up and you don't get a clear signal of any one micro so it seems very specific really doesn't seem to eat anything else so it's been hanging around for us humans to produce coffee imagine and this microb is pretty Much in everybody in the US in the UK even if like you you're not a coffee drinker you would still have low levels of this microb and

you say why is that possible you know I haven't had coffee for 20 years well it's all around us this microbe because we've all got it because half the population now are coffee drinkers um it's in people's breath their saliva you know we swap microbes of the people we share houses with so Nearly everyone has low levels of it except young children so when you're born infants don't have it so they they're acquiring it from around the place and then it stays dormant until it starts being fed coffee and then it grows up and gets

these enormous levels and what's really interesting then it feeds off the coffee and then we found that it then produc produces these chemicals that through the fermentation process that turn out to be really Healthy for us um and have been shown to reduce blood pressure and reduce blood sugar and things so all this is going to come out in this in this paper but it is AB fascinating because other countries that don't have a history of EA coffee don't have this bacteria at all it's like a panda you know and the panda only eats one

thing we all know that it only eats bamboo and you're saying that maybe quite as Extreme as that but basically this um horse and AAA Um lives on the fiber that comes off coffee is that what you're saying yeah that's right and it but it seems to be able to survive without it in a very sort of suspended animation form so it can sort of get by a little bit enough but it's not it's a very small fraction of your mic it won't reproduce it won't be happy until it finally gets uh you know that

shot of of its first cup of coffee and then it takes off and uh then it produces all these healthy chemicals That we know from the epidemiology are actually reducing our risk of heart disease and generally helping our our metabolic health and perhaps helping our blood sugar levels this a bit like a like a you know don't they say a dog can be vegetarian so it could live on it but it's pretty miserable that's not clearly what it but then finally you give it steak and it's like okay I'm off um I'm stretching the analogy

a little bit but it's sort of somehow they're managing to Survive a bit cuz if there was no food it could live on it wouldn't be there but basically this is the thing that it has the ability to really thrive on and presumably better therefore it can break down the coffee stuff better than all the other bacteria in your in your gut and so you often talk about this idea that there are you know it's sort of like a an ecosystem like in the jungle or in a coral reef with everything specialized and so here

you've actually Found this bacteria with this really clear onetoone relationship yeah no it's and it's it's the strongest signal we've got in all the foods and drinks so and has anyone done that before I mean is this now the are there many examples already of of where people have been able to find these these links no I think uh you know we're not the first to find this microbe it's been shown in some small studies but they didn't really know its Global epidemiology Patterns and I think showing how it affects uh normal people and the

idea of people who don't drink coffee still having low levels uh I think is really cool and also the other thing we found is that it still likes decaf as well so it's not as fussy I think there are many listeners who might be quite fussy about their decaf versus caffeine but this is an example of where you're saying it's not the caffeine in the coffee that that this bacteria cares about no and and Again it's it's not the caffeine that has the sort of seems to have the health benefits either so you know it's

all these other chemicals that are produced on the microbes are dialing into we don't know one of the many fibers in in in coffee and we don't know exactly which bit it's particularly targeting and but it it then thrives on that and uses that as an energy source and produces lots of other really fascinating chemicals that help Our body so I could just for a minute because I think for somebody listening to this I think they'd be like okay I understand that I've got this bacteria inside my gut that eats coffee help me to understand

though why that then creates any health for me as the human being like I can see it's good for the bacteria but why is that good for for me with the bacteria inside me so Global level you're you're having something as a Source of fiber which means in general um lots of mic crebs are benefiting and general gut health is improved but in this specific one which we got a nice example here it's showing that eating the the coffee the bits that get to the lower intestine have been mashed up a bit but they still

mainly intact and this L AAA is attaching to it breaking down some of those uh sugars uh in the in the fiber and as a byproduct is producing these uh key Chemicals probably many of them but we' we've isolated a couple of them one of them is quinic acid which um is well known constituent of coffee but it's producing in large amounts so it's perhaps liberating it and and sending that into the blood and we know that that chemical when you take it out of the system you put it into animals and things and some

human stories will do things like increase insulin levels and reduce blood sugar levels that's a good Thing which is a good thing so these these chemicals are generally having good effects on the body and all these chemicals used to be called antioxidants and sorry that was quinic acid is that what you said so yes so that's a specific example something you can measure that is really been created by this it's just one example I mean there's again you know our technology any allows us to to sort of get small microscope on one bit of it

there's Probably lots of other things happening there but that's a really nice example of high levels of this quinic acid are uh related to the presence of the L AAA so it's not just the presence of coffee it's when you got high levels of that microbe micro plus the coffee equals this other chemical which is something that normally you wouldn't get in your body and that chemical just like taking going to the chemist and get if I went to the chemist and then got some quinic Acid and said okay that's going to be good that's

going to be good for my blood sugar my metabolism and there might be other ones that are also good for reducing your blood pressure long term who knows reducing other stresses on the body anti-inflammatory effects so it's one of the first examples we've got of a constituent of food that reacts with a very specific bacteria to produce these chemicals and this is really the giving us this whole Picture of how our M our food interacts with our gut microbes to produce you know to they are basically these mini pharmacies and each of them is producing

an incredible little drug that we couldn't dream of uh producing ourself they know exactly the right dose they know what to give it and evolution and everything has done this to us and it's a way that we can now well there's a glib term that is medicine you can clearly see yeah you know a coffee bean Is a way of delivering something like quinic acid in exactly the right doses for your body if you have you know three to four cups a day so I've got can I get into the weeds just slightly here is

that okay you prob know much more about quinic acid I don't know that much it's I'm Vaguely Familiar with quinic acid um but I want to split out into coffee I want to sort of just as a question separate the fibers which would be very different compounds to the polyphenols Because when we come to doing a little bit of science later on I can look at one of these things I can't look at the other and so talking about quinic acid specifically makes me feel like polyphenols are a key constituent of the diet of this

thing because I know that when you roast coffee you degrade some of the polyphenols in the roasting process and one of the byproducts actually of roasting coffee is quinic acid and and so there's a sort of uh as A curve and a relationship there so I'm wondering if it is the polyphenols in coffee that the the La aaor is interested in or the sort of specific fibers present in coffee that I think are reasonably distinct to Coffee I think they've got slightly I don't know enough about fiber I know the names of some of the

coffee fibers but I don't know that much about them but they they're kind of to me they're sort of separate things and if you look at sort Of measuring the presence of either in coffee they don't necessarily correlate and that you can have lower fiber levels but quite high levels of um chlorogenic acid specifically are the kind of polyphenols most commonly found in coffee and so which is a precursor of quinic acid yeah so that's the bit where I'm like if I'm trying to theoretically optimize to feed this thing as much as possible I I

would think differently if I'm thinking about how do I get at the Maximum polyphenols versus the maximum fiber and so that's why I'm kind of interested in in its specific diet whether it's we're not sure it could be a little of both or it's more one than the other that's kind of what I'm interested in as a as a bit of a nerd right now well I don't think anyone knows the exact proportions um my understanding um of this is it's a bit of both okay that polyphenols are used as an direct energy source for

microbes To allow them to reproduce and uh do their thing and one of their things is to drill into the the fibers and uh extract again nutrients from that and then produce other ones as a byproduct so it's it's probably a bit of both I it's gonna be a while I think before we work out exactly what it is those proportions and also you know generally most of these work in combinations in teams in Guilds so it's very hard to work out who's doing what This is quite a rare example where you've got you know

what seems to be nearly a sort of one to one type system here but of course coffee isn't one thing so I simpler question you know um getting into the weed no no no no no no it's great but my simpler question is does this mean I have to start drinking coffee no um I think there are other ways uh you can improve your health and I but I think uh for those people who don't like the caffeine decaf Coffee really should be uh more of an option and uh I think we ought to be

exploring other foods and drinks that do contain some of these good things so that your body can still produce this substance like this quinic acid and I think that's where a lot of these new science takes us there could well be a a way of uh making a blend of coffee for example that you liked that we changed its taste profile so it was less bitter for you or what's interesting I don't Think um we've discussed this before but I gave up coffee more than 20 years ago and it was part of dealing with a

lot of food intolerances that I got so I was definitely drinking lots of coffee at 21 I I got these food intolerances after I was I was very sick with very sick with mononucleosis glandular fever and a few years after this as part of trying to deal with this I gave up coffee and one of the things I found was that coffee was definitely triggering a whole bunch Of um digestive problems and apparently this is you know it's quite common I remember it's one of the things the doctor had talked about um trying and it's

not necessarily the caffeine actually because um same impact really with um decaf and so this was part of what I gave up along with this whole process of giving up this vast amount of food and ending up on this sort of really miserable very processed diet um but interestingly what I did find was I Ended up sort of just drinking more tea that pulled up my level of caffeine and I I think I found like a happy medum which is there's a lot of caffeine in a coffee and I actually found that tea was lower

lower Spike so um it's not that I gave it up cuz I hated The Taste but I am sort of curious I think a lot of people listening to saying do I have to drink coffee for health or is this more saying like actually you should think about this as a healthy drink as opposed To the way that people have thought about it before as unhealthy but it's not saying you have to drink it if you don't want to but it is definitely like contributing to like the way we get fiber and all of these

positive things or is this like wow this is like a Silver Bullet if you're not drinking coffee you should really try quite hard because of how good you think it is I think it's nuanced I think I I wouldn't want anyone to regularly eat or drink Things they didn't like food is to be enjoyed and savored and that is the most important thing and everyone has food preferences and we've done our twin studies to show that some people you know are have a sensitive palette they don't like those bitter flavors at all and genetically their

threshold is is very different to someone else so realize we're all different don't start forcing people to do things but at the same time uh to this is a health drink The evidence is really clear that uh if you can have you know you can reduce heart heart attacks by 25% you know that's pretty cool if you can do that uh there's not many other ways something so simple you can you can actually achieve that so I would say to people haven't had it like you for you know 15 20 years try it again occasionally

or try different ways of having it or think of all these vitamins supplements multiv vitamins that people Take they don't really like taking them but they do it because they think they're doing some good and there's no evidence whatsoever here you have you know you could take a shot of espresso and it's you know easier to take the most vitamins and um you know a couple of those a day and you getting huge health benefits so I think just revisit it and realize that you can overcome these thresholds these bitterness thresholds by constant use you

be harder For you now because you've been off it uh but there might be other ways of doing it perhaps you know and that Spoonful of Sugar would probably the balance would still be positive you know maybe not with six sugars but um modern coffee in particular has has focused on reducing bitterness and improving kind of flavor as a kind of outcome and I think we see lighter roasted coffees that have less bitterness to them the way that we Prepare coffee you know I think really well-made coffee is is not that bitter compared to badly

made coffee I think the thing that's notable about humans is that we're we're pretty blank slates and our preferences are learned and while we have different perceptions of things like bitterness when it comes to flavor if you want to learn to like something well you can just choose to learn to like it like you can acquire a taste if you want to we do it all the time no one Enjoyed their first logger no one enjoyed their first lights or no one enjoyed their first coffee but we go back and we choose to acquire tastes

so genetic Studies have shown the threshold is there for bitter taste so so if you don't like coffee you don't often like red wine as much as white wine uh you might find broccoli and brussel sprouts hard to hard to have and this is more common in females and also uh dark beers so they tend to go together the these These profiles but as James saying you know you can get used to it very easily and most of us do that as students We have basically the world's foremost expert on coffee and we're going to

do something fun now just before we do it could you explain does the way in which you make your coffee have a big impact on both the taste but also sort of tying into what Tim is talking about does it impact there the health of these things the fiber and the polyphenols we've been Talking about yes uh a lot uh I mean taste is is is is the most important thing for someone like me but yes if you take some ground coffee and you brew it you are dissolving things from it okay and a good

percentage of coffee is not soluble you could Brew it forever keep running water through it in a a little drip machine it would still be there afterwards it's simply not soluble about soluble means it dissolves in it will dissolve in water it's it's you know It's kind of like wood what is left over a simplified way it just good bits are in the bitty bits yeah so you can wash out and dissolve into your Brew water about 30% of the grounds and so if you took 100 gr of ground coffee brewed it for ages dried

it out afterwards you'd have 70 G left okay right and the 30 grams Max would end up in a cup ideally you don't want 30% of the coffee some things you just want to leave behind actually that don't taste great Generally we want between probably 20 and 23 24% of the coffee dissolved in the cup below so you want all of it dissolved in you want to get somehow the good bits but leave some of the not nice tasting bits generally and and the there are some very bitter compounds that tend to come out at

higher extractions that people don't enjoy however if you don't get enough out of the coffee uh you tend to get a lot of the acids and not a lot else and it's a bit like lemon juice Rather than lemonade like good coffee should have some balanced acidity give it a kind of freshness to it add some flavor but but badly brewed coffee will just be sour unpleasant uh and to be avoided and so firstly you want to get the extraction right for the taste perspective and that's how finally you grind the coffee obviously the more

surface area you expose the easier it is for the water to get in and pull out the things that you want because there's a Correlation between um what you're extracting in terms of taste and what you're extracting in terms of the soluble fibers and uh things like the chlorogenic acids a well- brewed cup of coffee will have more of everything good more taste more chlorogenic acids more polyphenols therefore and theoretically a little bit more fiber too so all in all you want to get your money's worth you've bought some nice coffee there's good stuff in

it you want to make sure Getting it all out so that's the kind of the goal of good coffee brewing so I understand you have brought along a sort of mini laboratory to show us um how both a professional would sort of test for these compounds but therefore can also talk through for us to understand and we are going to have a sort of tasting and science experiment at the same time yeah I think it's interesting I have a little portable caffeine meter uh that has the benefit of also giving Me an output of chlorogenic

acids present in in the brew as well it'll be in milligrams per deciliter so per 100 milliliters uh we can scale it up to a normal cup of coffee for people in a minute but yeah it'll give you an idea of something like instant coffee versus fresh brood what what are the differences there and then we can have a look at instant as well which is a lot of people's choice and talk about some of the kind of theoretical benefits that Instant might have or might not have got it so we're going to try let's

just run through what are the different things that you're going to I'll make you some regular fresh well-grown Arabic coffee I've then got some good decaf coffee uh and I can talk about decaffeination because I think it's people something people want to know more about and sort of fear a little bit because they see chemistry and get a little bit nervous and then I've got some instant two and And instants super interesting on a technical level however you feel about the taste I'm going to try and stay away from the politics of taste of that

but but we can actually look at some of the chemistry of what you get in there or what you don't get in there got it and I think we might have a coffee kombucha as well good let's take a quick break I want to tell you about something new we've made for you a free guide that will Kickstart your journey to better Gut health now if you're a regular listener of this podcast you're no doubt already aware of how important the gut microbiome is it impacts our digestion it helps support our immune system and it

even impacts our mental well-being now as we've heard many times on this show and as our members know through using Zoey we feed our gut microbiome through the variet of foods we eat and in return our microbes give us this wealth of health Benefits so how can you nurture your gut in the best way which food swaps can you try to feed those good bacteria what ises a high fiber Shopping List look like well our free gut health guide will tell you all of that and more it's jam-packed with actionable tips designed to put you

in control of your gut health to get yours for free simply go to zoe.com SL gut guide all right James so we've got the equipment out which now looks Very impressive can you tell me what you've got sure this is called an eror press um it it was invented by the guy that invented the aab B and it's kind of a bit like a French press and a paper filtered Brewer Allin one so I'll put ground coffee in hot water let them steep together there's a paper filter at the bottom here and at some point

I'll press it and so it'll separate the grounds from the liquid uh I will add some coffee which I ground just before I Got uh in a cab to come here so it's nice and fresh and you're just throwing in a random amount of coffee I would use as a ratio 60 G of coffee per liter of water that I want to brew so I'm going to brew 20 G of coffee to 330 Ms and you very the answer is you very carefully measured the amount of coffee and you're going to put in just the

right amount of water is what you're saying yeah it just I like using wearing scales because most of the time I'm making coffee before I've had coffee and I don't want to guess or have to think and I like a wearing scale for telling me what I have to do uh and I just make the number happen so that's why I'm I'm big on scales and this is for an Americano so this will Brew like a filter strength Brew yes so close Americano tend to be fractionally stronger but like a drip coffee kind of strength

seem to be the easiest thing and while you're pouring tell me about the water CU one thing That did entertain me is that James arrived with his own water I don't know how much you want to know about water because it's a miserable subject but um the minerals in water play a big role in uh extracting the flavors so they are involved in essentially dissolving some of the stuff that we want but then there's also uh something called alkalinity which uh or a buffer if you want to get into the chemistry which will affect your

perceived acidity and Too much buffer makes everything taste a bit Brown and dull no buffer makes things taste very sour and unpleasant so I brought water that had an ideal amount of minerals in terms of calcium and an ideal amount of buffer so that we get some acidity but not too much so you won't take the water out of the tap you have to um get your own espcially modified water to make the coffee the way you want it to taste London water tastes good but it has a lot of calcium And a lot of

buffer on it too so um it tends to make all coffee kind of taste a bit the same which is a bit of a shame and so I you know I've paid for the good stuff I want it out and I want to enjoy it as much as possible making your own waterers a little bit extreme I agree I'm glad you're still at the point where you can see a little bit at least the entertainment that I'm taking from the fact that you not only brought your own coffee which seems very reasonable but Brought your

own water which I think is acceptable but verging on the slight about adding salt you mentioned so yeah Salt's interesting um Salt's a great little hack in that for the majority of people it's not everyone uh table salt acts as a bitterness suppressor right you it's one of the reasons you obious see salt and dark chocolate together actually it makes them more palatable as well as enhancing flavor to but if you are served miserably bitter coffee you Know the kind of the the real filth in a hotel breakfast kind of coffee uh a tiny sprinkle

of salt and I mean a tin don't you know just a little tiny sprinkle s in you'll be shocked at it sort of mutes the bitterness quite impressively and increases let's say palatability when you just need the caffeine I want to help get you there uh this shouldn't need salt I would hope and so talk me through the the hot water's been sitting there right now and you described before About how the fact that the ground coffee has a lot of things inside it which are going to start to dissolve so is that what is

going on right now right now so you know essentially the water is pulling these things out of the cells that we've sort of exposed through grinding the Coffee Bean and so the longer you leave it the more is being dissolved out there's a point at which you have diminishing returns and it's it's not worth waiting much more so I'm Just giving a quick mix before I press it down and then we'll press it through and we'll have a brew now this is paper filtered from a health perspective the data seems to suggest that actually paper

filtered is healthier for you than unfiltered I think it was a big Scandinavian study that sort of showed that the peak Health sort of heart health benefits came with filtered coffee I think there's a couple of lipids in coffee that were sort of Filtered by paper that show a correlation to an increased rate sort of level of sort of serum cholesterol I just enjoy it more if I'm honest I I enjoy the clarity of flavor I'm not sure it's that convincing though because these are intermediate effects on lipids and as we're saying lipids are complicated

so shortterm change in lipids doesn't mean necessarily long-term uh health health so I stick with the one you you prefer I think now What I'm going to do is just do a little caffeine test on this and then I can dispense to you that looks quite weak to me it's a roast so this is uh actually from a Scandinavian coffee company and Scandinavians are famous for their light roasts but it should have a little bit more fress to it lower levels of bitterness from being a lighter roast so for the I don't like coffee you

could approach this more as as like a strange fruit tea mentally and see how you get On with that I'm very excited I mean I'm definitely drinking the the coffee that has been uh made in this Exquisite fashion so I'll just give it a quick stir just to to get a better sample and James You' brought a piece of technology here do you want to talk us through for those people who are just listening on uh on audio what are you doing so it's a little Bluetooth connected caffeine and chlorogenic acids analyzer what I'll do

is I'll pull a very specific uh quantity Of coffee with a little pet here and I'll add it to a small solution that I'll shake together for a while and then there's a chip that I insert into a machine I cover a little sensor with the liquid uh the reagent and the coffee and then within about 15 seconds it'll tell me the caffeine Quant uh content and the chlorogenic acid content which is a sort of polyphenol so about I think 90% of the polyphenols in coffee are counted as chlorogenic acids I think there are some

Others in there but it there's a very strong correlation between the quantity Bas is giving you a measure of the amount of polyphenols one of the major classes of polyphenols there's loads of individual variants within that but that's like a big category um how cool so I have to shake this for 10 do you do this every time you go to a coffee shop no no because they're like Fiverr a test so uh it's very quickly I mean it's Interesting we did it we we took to sort of different chains to look at the variance

in if you ordered an espresso what's the caffeine dose going to be and how much is it going to vary and the answer is massively uh and caffeine is one of those things and as much as it isn't all that coffee is it is a big part of it where it's the most popular drug and we consume in a completely unregulated way if you order a coffee out you have no idea how much caffeine You're about to consume and I'm not sure that's good uh if I'm as much as I like coffee I'm just not

sure that that's a brilliant idea it's like going to a p and not knowing what percentage of alcohol is in that beer isn't it absolutely any any of these coffee shop chains uh even in the same machine um same trained staff will produce uh a different so a high degree of variation it's not like when you're just drinking a beer or something that Every glass of beer has the same level it's regulated you got you've got to show on it how much alcohol is in that bottle and the caffine will change no there's no testing

in terms of caffeine can I send this along to you if you want to have a little taste yes I would love to have a taste tell me how I'm supposed to taste my coffee if you have a glass that that is sort of oval shaped so to speak yes swirling it will give you a kind of nice head space of Aromas that You can smell if you want to do that you don't have to do that if you sip it if you slurp when you sip you will generally have a sort of more intense

flavor experience as you sort of um spray the coffee around and send more stuff volatile um like olive oil tasting all anyone wine tasting whiskey Everyone likes a slurp what I would say someone who hasn't drunk coffee for a really long time is smells really nice much less strong than I would normally expect From coffee and the color also you Tim already sort of um mentioned this actually looks like it could be a tea it's really not that dark yeah so as a brew this is on the very light very fruity end and you might

think oh there's no caffeine in this then no uh so the caffeine level will start there that's the easiest thing uh because that's sort of understandable to most people so that's uh 72 milligrams per deciliter so if you drank let's say a a Small which would be 200 Ms that would be 140ish 145 milligrams of of caffeine the daily recommended sort of dosage for uh adult males is about up to 3 to 400 gram milligrams so that's almost half your amount just in one small C so three Smalls over the course of the day would

exceed your uh recommended caffeine dose so it's actually surprisingly caffeinated I would say so I'm going to drink this but my caffeine is about to go through the roof so if later I'm Talking very very fast at the end of the podcast you'll know why you've got a small amount there it's not it's not a lot but yes that's a decent whack of caffeine chlorogenic acids this will only be useful as we look at other things in comparison I suspect 166 milligrams per deciliter of chlorogenic acids here so a decent dose I would say of

chlorogenic acids um which is good news because that's that's good for lactor he's going to be happy down there Or it's going to be happy all these polyphenols and so this is what's going to be feeding these bacteria in the paper you were talking about earlier but the fiber content of this would be relatively low compared to something like a darker roast I think there is more breakdown of certain compounds uh in Darker roast that make them soluble and easier to extract take us to the next coffee well I brought Some decaf next uh which

I thought would be interesting because I'm curious to see how it Stacks up if you skip the caffeine what are the polyphenol benefits like in in a decaf so this coffee from Brazil it's a decaf coffee so you decaffeinate coffee before you roast it so you take the raw coffee seeds and you decaffeinate those there's a bunch of ways to do it that have various nice sounding names all of them are safe and I think a lot of people Hear certain chemical names and inevitably freak out at the out of ethylacetate uh which is often

known as the sugarcane process because no one likes the name ethylacetate so yeah I think decaf historically has been underrated I think people don't think if decaf is delicious I think people see it decaf is a compromise which is a terrible shame it's harder to roast as as a Coffee Roasting Company it's harder to make it taste good but it's actually Very possible to make good tasting decaf I think for a long time decaf drinkers have been undervalued they are the true coffee lovers because they're not even getting the chemical hit out of it they're

just drinking it for the taste and yet they are not well- looked after by the time I made you a flat white most people would have no idea if it was a good well produced decaf well roasted well brewed delicious absolutely delicious I drink a lot of decaf now cuz I I'm quite caffy and sensitive and I I value my sleep quite highly and so my afternoons are full of decaf CU I this would be a way basically to reduce a lot of I guess the main health risk about the coffee right which is that

it impacts your sleep and we know how important sleep is right I'm precious about that and you still get you said Tim most of the health benefits yes that's correct you still get the heart benefits from from decaf and you're Making it exactly the same way and it looked to me exactly the same as a as the ground it doesn't need special treatment get my dose in there right and I give you a little uh mix and a share excellent and before we get to the answer yeah I'm going to ask Tim so what is

your guess in terms of the looking at this um on the fiber content and the polyphenols how do you think it's going to um compare with the first one well fiber should be Higher and we know that decaf coffee has the same fiber as uh regular as a general rule if things are more bitter they're more and more tanic and more astringent on your tongue and less smooth they're more likely to be higher in polyphenol count so it smells stronger to me like less sort of soft than the last there's a lot of reasons for

that it's a different roast level it's a different country of origin I would still say low Bitterness um quite gentle friendly in that perspective the polyphenols came in at about 158 Mig per deciliter so I would say not a statistically significant variation previous one was about 170 I think so high plenty of those things available there I think the interesting thing for me about instant as a contrast coming into this is that um instant cheats in an interesting kind of way the manufacturer of instant is motivated by Price more than anything Else and so what

they need to do to keep this as cheap as possible is to yield as much as is humanly possible from the coffee beans that they start with and so through a variety of processes that are only used by instant coffee manufacturers they can get their extractions up past 30% they can get it all the way up to about 55% which means that they can get almost twice as much out of a coffee bean compared to normal people Brewing at home they do that by Breaking down some of the insoluble stuff uh they sort of hydrolize

it and then it effectively acts as a bulking agent and so you would then therefore see higher technically higher fiber contents in instant coffee than you would see in filter coffee but there's a trade-off that's come from less coffee beans in the first place and so what I'll do is I'll Brew this at a sort of matching strength to to these here and and that'll give you a Sort of matching strength and then we can have a little look at the caffeine as well as the uh the polyphenols interestingly they recommend you brew instant quite

weak they recommend a 1% strength I'll say 1 gram per 100 Ms which is which is surprisingly weak uh especially as it's that's why when I try a strong one it's virtually undrinkable isn't it so it's designed to be weak to be to be produced quite weak now just as you're making the instant there'll be a Yeah there'll be people listening to this who have no idea what instant coffee is could you just explain for a minute it's sitting in a packet it's lots of these little granules so instant coffee the way you make it

is is basically you make a very large very strong cup of coffee and then uh you freeze dry ideally all of the moisture out of it and what you end up with is a sort of solid clumped powdered thing and what they then do is Uh turn it into a shape that mimics ground coffee to most people to sort of remind you of ground coffee uh but you could sell this as a pure powder you could sell it as large chunky flakes so really it's like dried coffee and then you rehydrate it's uh it's like

a stock powder you know what I mean and you were going to reconstitute it into water and when I was growing up this was the primary way that people drank coffee in The UK but I know that in the states where I also grew up this was never really um the primary way that people had coffee and they used to have sort of like a filter coffee in the house was the benefit of this really convenience is that where this comes from or that's that's primarily it it's there's no you need a kettle and you

can just you know scale it very easily you need to make 10 mugs of it one mug of it it's just you know 10 spoonfuls or one spoonful it's It's very easy but with all convenience comes compromise and so as we suppress the price of this the qualities of raw materials inside instant coffee will inevitably much lower um and then that that doesn't start you in a good place and then it's manufactured to kind of Maximum yield not about maximum flavor they do some clever stuff in that uh when you buy a jar they will

have injected just under the gold foil lid on the top uh some Aromas that did they do An oil extraction and then they capture some of the Aromas of fresh coffee and inject them under the foil lid so that when you Pock it open there's a release of Aroma that reminds you of fresh coffee even though those flavors were never present in the soluble material underneath this is like selling a house and you're told you should bake bread um and people like oh I'll buy that house it always smells of baked bread but they don't

realize doesn't come with the House this is the the coffee equivalent is it pretty much give you a quick stir and we've made coffee which is obviously much faster than me messing around um with a coffee brewer but let's have a look at what we get as a result so this is technically the same strength as the last thing I gave you okay well it is really dark compared like the previous ones when my hand was underneath it I could actually it was just like a little brown this is so dark I can't see my

Hand at all right so it it's a completely different color and yet you're saying it's the same it's still 1% of this water is made of coffee but 1.3 doesn't smell anything like the other two at all doesn't smell very much of anything actually no uh because the process of of brewing and freeze drying and you lose a lot inevitably in that process especially the aromatic stuff this is used half the amount of coffee to make it essentially so it's half the Amount of coffee and they've just extracted more like like a sort of squeezing

an olive crushing a whole Olive absolutely uh end yield 38.8 milligrams of C caffeine so about half the caffeine of the first thing you tasted surprising half the caffeine half the caffeine uh 33.5 Mig per liter of chlorogenic acid so only 20% of the polyphenols yes that we had in the um but lots of fiber in the previous but lots of fiber so Interestingly so that's a a strange one so you know if you're just chasing fiber in coffee this actually is pretty good whether those are the right kind of fibers that that are preferred

by your gut microbiome couldn't say uh but it it's it's definitely lower in things like polyphenols what are your thoughts Tim I haven't had actually instant coffee for a long long Time and but actually it's not that bad if you get the concentration right you know it's it's perfectly drinkable yeah it's just it's just not complex it doesn't have any of the the other interesting Aromas or flavors this is what I think of as coffee tasting like as a sort of thing you might have served at the end of some dinner which and it's yeah

premium end of it instant I would say uh yeah it it gets much worse this is the As Good As It Gets but I would Say if you're chasing the health benefits of coffee it seems to me that that good quality coffee brewed fresh I is the best of all worlds because you get lots of what you want and it tastes really good and and for me that encourages both uh delight and more consumption it's easier to drink a good quantity of this stuff if you really enjoy it so I think that was fascinating and

we have one left to go don't we which is not really a coffee at all yeah We were exploring other ways of uh having coffee if you don't like it the taste in the original sort of Beverage form and so as people know I like fermented foods and drinks and you can have uh coffee Kucha and there's two ways of doing this so kombucha is basically a a fermented tea where you use a scobby which is this blob like composite of uh fungi and microbes together in a in a look like a bit of a

Jellyfish floating around and they basically like eating tea and sugar and once you've got a nice big healthy one you can put it in a mixture of tea and coffee and it will prod juice it will transform that coffee into something new and original that's got tiny bit of alcohol in it uh you can't generally taste it 1% but of CO2 and all these extra chemicals that make it healthy for you and it's so probiotic coffee could be the ultimate it doesn't Grow as well it it prefers tea to Coffee see don't get as much

and it's they're harder to grow so so they're harder to find and you have to then put it back into tea after it's done a bit of its coffee stint you can't keep it going in coffee right um and then there's another way of doing it which is what I do is make it in tea the normal way and then for a second fermentation you you pour it off and you you add a little bit of coffee flavoring with a little bit of Extra sugar and that gives you all the coffee Aromas and um you've

got a coffee beverage there that's got the combination of both the tea and the coffee and uh is is really really different but I find it delicious and James have you had this before I haven't had this I've had various coffee kombuchas over the years and so are you were pulled by this idea or excited and can we pour a bit and maybe yeah I can't actually measure it yet because I need Something that's uh not fizzy because the the the gas messes with the pet measurement so we'll come back to it in a little

bit The Challenge technically or typically with coffee and kombucha is that a good cup of coffee has quite a complex acid profile a bunch of different acids in there contributing to that and um sort of synergies between different acids can get quite complex and so once you throw an acetic acid that Vinegar you can really produce a very strange outcome you know it's it's mixing different vinegars doesn't always work out and so I've mostly tasted pure coffee comes with a sweetened brewed coffee you know and the scobby has gone to work just on that and

the acid outcome has been challenging uh I'm very curious about this one though all right let's try it cheers cheers well that's pretty weird what do you think well I've had these ones before so I'm I the first time you drink it it is you're not expecting it so it's a sort of coffee pop isn't it yeah it's like a weird combination between like a fizzy sort of I almost had like apple juice in my mind and coffee at the same time which is a very strange so they've done this combination this is the second

fermentation one so it's basically a a kombucha then done a second ferment for me I like my ferments to go a little longer I feel like this is quite a Gentle it's a bit light it's a it's a beginners I want more acid I want more pain but I think it's a beginner's one and for someone who doesn't like coffee could you drink that yeah I could it's actually I mean it's it's quite it was weird the first time but could I drink that glass of that definitely well while we're waiting to measure it because

you said it's too fizzy to get the polyphenol answers I had a couple of final questions I'd love to First is Like you you given us all of these different types of coffees I think lots of people were listening to this and saying um imagine that I'm going into a coffee shop rather than making this at home what is James's top tip for picking the best coffee in that situation first and foremost I'm going to be pro- independent coffee shops they have a different motivation they're trying to win you we with the quality of the

product not with convenience and Familiarity which is how chains tend to work so it's worth the gamble to find a good independent coffee shop they care more about the coffee it'll be fresher it'll probably be of higher quality it'll probably be theoretically higher in things like polyphenols which that's a broad statement and I'm very nervous making it but you would hope that would be the case and so that would be the first thing and then I think you know as long as coffee is well brewed which Again Independents these days tend to do well whether

it is a flat white or it is a filter coffee or it is a straight espresso it's actually a matching kind of extraction of the raw material across all of those things and so you should see the benefits kind of regardless of your preferred drink but um you know people or or independent businesses are excited to talk to you about what you like and help you find something that you like and it's always worth a Conversation uh and finding your local sort of place I think we we we don't have that feeling as much anymore

of like your local coffee shop and and that's a shame if you know that's the the thing Independents offer over chains too is community space experience so yeah all of those things is is is why I'm Pro Independent Business and one question that we were asked a lot um from our listeners was what about people with High blood pressure so Tim you've been talking about all the great health benefits of coffee but you also mentioned I think that uh historically people were told not to drink um coffee because it raised blood pressure if you have

high blood pressure what is your advice I think if your blood pressure is not under good control then you have to be very careful with with coffee and caffeine but all the studies suggest that if you're just starting to drink Coffee it's only the first few weeks that your blood pressure will go up and then it stabilizes so I wouldn't advise anyone to completely change their uh diet or anything they're doing if they don't have stable blood pressure get it stable and then start to slowly introduce um uh coffee into your diet it's not as

far as I'm aware a contraindication if your blood pressure pressure is well controlled I monitor my blood pressure and uh coffee has no Effect on that and there's some evidence that long term it might actually reduce your blood pressure got it so you're saying someone's listening to this and they have high blood pressure but it's under high control and they like coffee you're not saying don't worry give up and they were old studies they're out of date they showed that people who hadn't been exposed to coffee if you give them large doses short term your

blood pressure can go up so obviously if if it You know you have a problem short term you don't want to have that problem but if it's well controlled then no real problem long term and long term we know from all the epidemiology that for the average person they will get derive benefit long um in terms of their heart health but you know the caveat as always is we're everyone is an individual and all our responses are going to be different we can't uh give advice device that is going to apply to absolutely Everybody we're

talking uh at this point averages and there's always decaf yes so that there's always decaf and I think it was the blood pressure story was mainly about the the caffeine side of it so as we've heard decaffinated coffee is uh safe the chemical processes are now considered very sophisticated and safe there's plenty on the market find one that you like no need to have caffeine I everyone's going to work out you know the lots of factors that affect your ca Your caffeine metabolism work out what suits you experiment find out you know but for many

people it does get them going in the day and gives them a Clarity of thought you know in their thought processes and other things that are important and that's that's why I have coffee in the morning but I don't have it at night right let's see what we've got all right what have we got me just get you going and Okay interesting um so caffeine first this came out about 33 milligrams so actually comparable to slightly less than the instant but but comparable to actually a normal strength instant uh chlorogenic acids came out at 55

.87 so you know 55 to 60 probably realistically uh which is I thought decent actually like better than instant and certainly more enjoyable and fun to drink uh so yeah interesting okay so more more polyphenols than instant Coffee in still a lot less than the coffee which shows how high the coffee levels were but there may be I assume some polyphenols from the tea in there as well which may not be picked up by this if they're not specifically chlorogenic acid so probably a broader profile suggesting it's a healthy drink as well I would like

to do a quick summary and today has been really fun because we got to do a science experiment while uh While we were doing this I think you know the key takeaway is that um coffee has been really reassessed from something that we were being told was really unhealthy to something that we Now understand is actually healthy and that how we understand that is very much about the way it has the impact on our microbiome and how our microbiome then affects us and so that there there are two different components in the coffee that are

really important one is the Fiber um and one is the polyphenols and interestingly there's lots of fiber that is soluble which is not how I have ever really thought about fiber and so we heard James making the coffee and you could see hot water going in sort of sucking all of this fiber and polyphenols out of this um ground up bean from a plant um and that interestingly there's this great new um paper which we will um uh share as soon as it's peer- reviewed and and and Published which shows that this is then feeding

one particular bug that we've now discovered which I think Lona backa did I just about manag to pronounce that Tim y um which we can see basically is like a test for whether or not you drink coffee so I will get my microbiome retested tomorrow and we'll see whether it's I think it takes a bit longer that probably right Tim which then creates these chemicals as a result of eating This coffee which we understand I think you mentioned this thing quinic acid is just one example of something that we know then has his positive impact

in our body because it sort of passes through into our blood so that's very exciting this does not mean you have to drink coffee there are other ways that you can get fiber and poly phenols but it means that if you do like um coffee you should be feeling good about this and that interestingly for you know a Lot of people in in the US or the UK the amount of fiber from your coffee if you're drinking three or four cups you say could be very significant because our total fiber intake is is so low

and then we did this wonderful test um where we tried a variety of coffees and one of the things that was really striking to me is that the decaffeinated coffee scored just as highly on this polyphenols count as the caffeinated coffee which is not at all how I would Think about it I sort of put it in my mind as a bit like instant coffee not really very good for you the instant coffee on the other hand was much lower on um the polyphenol so you've really lost a lot and then we tried this fun

coffee kombucha which is definitely not something I suspect most of our listeners are regularly taking and interesting there were really polyphenols in there and so I think that's really fun to see some real like That scientific measurement right there that there are some of these good things um in that drink uh and so the net result I think is don't drink the instant coffee do go to an independent coffee shop um and after that it's a lot about your your taste choices and and don't at all feel scared about taking the the decaf because in

a way you avoid the the caffeine and you're still getting most of these health benefits very good and I look forward there will Presumably be more papers to come as we uh understand more about caffeine and as the number of participates in participants in Zoe grows yeah well be able to do one on tea hopefully soon I would I'm all up for that one wonderful thank you so much James for back and thank you Tim thank you thank you for joining me on Zoe science and nutrition today it's been really fun to learn about the

different types of coffee their beneficial compounds and Tim's new Research on coffee in the gut microbiome it's even tempting me to drink coffee myself a little bit now if you're interested in finding out more about your own gut microbiome something that I do regularly then you can learn more about becoming a Zoe member getting your gut microbiome tested and receiving personalized advice on how to eat the best foods to support a healthy gut you can also get 10% off your membership simply go to zoe.com Podcast as always I'm your host Jonathan wolf Zoe science and

nutrition is produced by yellow hings Martin Richard Willen and Tilly fford see you next time [Music] oh