Choose Mold-Free Coffee For Optimal Health

Introduction to Coffee and Mycotoxins 0:00

Welcome to Mold, Mycotoxins and Chronic Illness summit. I'm your host, doctor and shippy. And today we get to talk to Andrew Salisbury, who's the founder and CEO of Purity Coffee. So thank you so much for joining us. Oh, thanks for inviting me. I think a lot of people don't realize that coffee is such a big risk for really causing a lot of toxicity in their bodies. So let's start out by just explaining that. Why? You know why your mic could talk something. Coffee. I think the the the the main thing to remember is that the mycotoxins will mold, which then can turn into mica toxins because the mycotoxins are eating the mold again, developing hot climates.

So, you know, the World Health Organization talks about the sort of, products like grains and wheats, that could develop mycotoxins. Coffee also is, is part of that category. And they're typically grown in countries that are hot and humid. And any time is hot and humid, you're going to develop potentially mold. And if you can develop mold and you could develop mycotoxins. So I think we all have to be very conscious along all the steps of the journey to make sure that mold never develops in the coffee, so that it never turns into the mycotoxins.

That obviously would be, bad for people's health. So that's probably the main reason. So, I'm just so curious, like what? What kind of sets have to happen to make sure that the coffee is safe? Well, we sort of approach this a little bit differently than than most other coffee companies. I mean, we see coffee as, as a health food, and we think that, you know, people are it it is kind of right, because there's always studies showing that coffee is helpful. Absolutely, absolutely. And I'd be happy to tell you a little bit about our story in the beginning and how we got started.

But but yeah, that's that's exactly it. It's it's incredibly good for you. A lot of health benefits that are associated with, with coffee. And so, you know, one of the real issues here is that that

Purity Coffee's Health-First Mission 2:06

we have to focus on, on all those things that are likely to impact health. And so our position is that one of the many things that could impact health is obviously the development of mycotoxins in coffee. There's lots of other things we look at as well. We look at, you know, we want to make sure that our coffee is, organic, it's pesticide free, that it's, you know, not looking for pesticide residue. We want to make sure it's specialty grade. So none of the defects that could cause health issues and actually cause toxins to develop in the roast are present.

So we pretty much make every decision based on health. And, I think that's that's that's, our perspective as a company. That's so good to know. So let's dig into your story. I'm really curious how how do you decide? Coffee. What is important and, Yeah, yeah. What brought you to this point? It's sort of a funny journey, and my background has not been in coffee. It's been in software and, but basically we sold, so that company, I took a year off with my wife, and during that time, probably a lot of high stress things were going on.

But, she started to develop, what? We really never really understood exactly what it was, but it was low energy. The result was low energy. And like most of us, she was sort of caffeinated with coffee every morning. And I overcaffeinated and I'm English and a tea drinker, was a tea drinker. And so the argument was, you know, you have to give up your coffee. I've been reading about it. There's a lot of health experts that are trying to get you to reduce your coffee intake or give up on coffee. And, you know, naturally, she was very resistant.

She said, okay, give me evidence. You need to show me some some evidence of this. So it started doing basic searches on the internet, and then I was lucky enough to to meet two professors from the Institute of Coffee Studies at Vanderbilt. And they gave me this long shopping list of just the health benefits of coffee. Everything from the health benefits for liver reversal or, reduction of risk of type two diabetes, heart disease, and that it's the number one antioxidant in the American diet. And so that sort of got me curious.

Obviously my wife won the arguments. I reckon I that's pretty amazing that you go to experts at Vanderbilt to get your, your answer to convince your wife. That just tells us a little something about you. It is either amazing or shallow, you know, I mean, I think you want to go to the absolute experts to get your information. And the fact that you could do that is quite impressive. But it really got me so curious because, you know, this could have stopped right there and then, I asked them, okay, fantastic.

Who's making every decision based on health? What brand should I buy? My wife. And they could say, look, we can tell you exactly what you should look for in coffee, but we can't tell you anybody who's doing it. And it just struck me as very funny that something that, you know, 164 million Americans got up this morning and drank a cup of coffee.

Founding Story and Coffee Research 5:00

And given that that there's not a focus on the health benefits of this, you know, incredible product and that we're not making every decision based on health. And so that's why I started to think, well, what would happen if we made every decision based on health? What would we end up with? Would we end up with something that was $200 a pound and tastes like ditch water, you know? Yeah. And so that's where when we started on that journey and, they introduced me, these professors introduced me to, Professor Adriana Ferrar from the University of Brazil in Rio.

And she's one of the leading health experts on coffee and health. She consults with the World Health Organization. And it started with maybe a two month project, and wrapped into about eight months in the end, where I asked, what would happen if we made every decision based on health, you know, what would it look like and what decisions we make? And so we started on every step of that journey. And obviously mold and mycotoxins became a big part of that or a part of it. I wouldn't say a big part, but it was the nice thing about having a Northstar, which is every decision based on health, is that a lot of decisions are very easy.

Nobody was telling us the mold or mycotoxins in coffee was a good thing. So it was one of these things that we could immediately say, okay, we need to make sure that it's tested for and we avoid, those contaminants in the coffee. And that's, that's sort of how we got started, just, 18 months later, we launched in 2017 with our first coffee. And then, you know, was really well received by interesting enough, a lot of people who had a health concerns. So we tend to gravitate towards sort of two areas of the spectrum, people who are, very health conscious.

And this is just one part that they want to be congruent with, that, they're taking supplements, they're eating organic, they're doing very health conscious things. And then the other category and the other side of the barbell is people who've got health concerns that coffee can genuinely help with. Okay, let's keep on this path of, like, with this premise, you know, health this first. Yeah. Like, why why does it actually take to make sure that the coffee meets the standards that you've set? It starts with, well, there's a lot of things, in here that the first thing and again, some of these decisions, if you think of this as a North Star, they're very easy decisions.

So should it be organic or should it have pesticides. Nobody's arguing that it should have pesticides. They're just saying it's cheaper to produce if it has pesticides. And we weren't going to use that as a rule. So the coffee had to be organic because coffee is one of the most heavily treated crops on the planet, and is also treated in countries that don't have the same level of oversight that the US has. So, for instance, and the sulfur and glyphosate and some of those products that are banned in the US are used in these countries and on these farms.

So it needed to be organic. We also needed to test for pesticide residues, because we needed to be sure that even though it was certified organic, there's some, some, some basically some pests that can actually wipe out the entire harvest of that particular crop of coffee. So the farmers often, I wouldn't say often the farmers are tempted if they're organically certified to cheat, if they've got, let's say, coffee rust or berry beetle. So there's a lot of focus on on making sure, you know, trust but verify.

So organic is one step. It needs to be mold and mycotoxins free. And so there's testing along the side. And that means that, along the stage of coffee, there's a lot of places where moisture develops on the coffee. And there's a lot of shortcuts with coffee where people choose to take those because as a commodity and commodity pricing, if they can reduce the cost, they make more, more margin. So the shortcuts are taken. So, the, the probably the primary area of mold and mycotoxins that we look at is that, coffee needs to be treated like, like a food product, food safety standards, the difference of our coffee, and then maybe other fruit

Organic Sourcing and Mold Prevention 9:00

where you could pick a banana and it would ripen in transit. You pick a, a coffee cherry and it will start to mold or start to rot almost immediately. So the way that is processed, yeah, is it's very important. Things like the roasting protocol are very important. You can create toxins in the way that the coffee is roasted, and handle. So without, you know, perhaps going into too much detail for this audience in the early stages of roasting. Yeah, you get a thing called acrylamide, which is, obviously very bad for you.

Is from the Maillard reaction. And in the later stages of roasting, you have, which is for many bird food, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons pages. And that's also carcinogenic. So creating the right roast curve. But probably the one thing that makes the most difference is that, the good stuff in coffee, the cGAS, the chlorogenic acids. So making every decision based on health means that we want more of the good stuff and less of the bad stuff. So it's it's testing for the bad stuff and making sure that we don't have that in the coffee.

So mold, mycotoxins, pesticide residue. We're not creating any negative compounds in the roast. But at the same time, we're also buying and looking for coffee that has the most amount of cGAS, the most amount of antioxidants. And we want to maintain those antioxidants in the roast. And that's in this new coffee with so complicated can be. I mean, I honestly was a little bit drinking it from a fire hose. And initially when we started looking at this because every step created his own challenges that typically the coffee industry didn't have to look at.

Because if your goal is to turn a green coffee bean brown and make it taste nice, that's a little bit easier than making it, focused on health, which means avoiding that bad stuff and getting more of the good stuff, the more of the cGAS, and there's a lot of depth that goes into that, particularly on the farming side, like what we do a lot of work on the soil and that sort of thing to make sure that, it creates an environment which is very good for, for the coffee in the case. Oh, that's so interesting, because I think a lot of times about, new farming as being the things to actually grow good crops or a lot of the same things it takes to have a healthy body.

Yeah. So that's interesting to hear how important the soil is. Yeah. So it sounds like you're really partnering with the, with the farmers to make sure that there's a, a good foundation, a good place to start. Yeah. We noticed something within about the first two years of our business, which is that we would lab coat, lab test coffee from around the world, and we would look for the coffee that was highest in antioxidants. But then we started to notice that the coffee that was grown in its natural way, in the natural environment.

So we would look for things like bud friendly, Smithsonian, bird friendly, handpicked, hand-selected. All of those were indicators that the coffee was grown, its natural environment were lots were likely to be higher in cGAS. And so that's why about a year and a half ago, we invested in our first farm so we could experiments on the soil level, and we can actually do some things to improve the quality, even from a very good baseline. Well, that's really fascinating. I thought that you're really, really, truly optimizing.

Yeah. Not just saying like, okay, well what's the best out there? But now you're taking it a step further and and creating the best. I think the, the challenges that a lot of coffee farmers that are not necessarily motivated to look for coffee for health because nobody's paying for coffee for health, and because of that reason, because they're being paid based on commodity pricing, they don't do the things that they're aware of that they could do to improve the health benefits of the coffee. So what we've done is we partnered with great farms that invested in our own farm so we could make those decisions and we finance and actually, provide that extra income for the farmers to make those sort of investments in the farm, which are good for the the crop, like things like bio char, bio digesters, all of this, you know, is basically the rule is honestly that, that, that the coffee is that is good for your health is also really good for the environment.

So I mean, there's no corner that's really powerful. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. That's the next wave. You know, it's the next. I think people as they start to recognize that there's a difference in coffee, they'll start to ask for coffee that is is good for their health. And they'll look for certain things that indicate that. And that's going to be the next direction that we want to focus on. So we probably have a lot of reports coming in from, people who purchased your coffee. What kind of things are you hearing from them?

Yeah, that was a little bit of the the law of unintended consequences.

Roasting, Antioxidants, and Freshness 13:48

Like, you know, when we first, launch, we didn't know whether the this would be like fish oil that people would say, oh, I trust this brand. And they're doing everything that I care about, but I really can't tell the difference in my body. What happened was that people actually could tell the difference in their body. So we started to get testimonials through where people who either couldn't drink coffee or had things like mast cell activation syndrome, or if they had, allergies to various things, they, they couldn't drink coffee, but they could drink our coffee.

So that was a real eye opener for us. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense to me, because we know that these toxins really disrupt the gut and disrupt the immune system. Even locally, but then getting absorbed into the body systemically and poisoning our mitochondria and all kinds of things. So with the possibility of the coffee being actually a pretty high source of mycotoxins, that people are putting in their body every day usually. Yeah. It's I love that that, at your getting such positive reports. Yeah.

I mean, to date, I think we have, 34,000 testimonials on our sites. Is a little crazy. I still look, I read, I read every testimonial. Had goosebumps getting it. Was that. Yeah. It's crazy. Full body chills. 34,000. I mean, to take the time to write a testimonial. It's huge. And some of these testimonials are two paragraphs long. They're very detailed. And we honestly the advice and the the feedback we get from our customers is incredibly valuable for us in terms of what people care about and also the results that people are seeing.

So it gives everybody in the company motivation to keep on, you know, doing better. And even passing that down, you know, to the farms, to the growers, like, yeah, that's got to make them feel really great too, that that extra effort to make sure that the berries aren't holding instantaneously and that they're not cheating on the, using the pesticides and yeah, you know, again, some things that's got to. Yeah, exactly. Enhance the partnerships. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it has to be a full value chain all the way along.

We have to make sure that the farmers are taken care of because they're doing an incredibly good job. Our farmers are doing, incredibly good job in terms of focusing on those things that could impact the coffee as a as a fruit and then turning it into the processing and our roasters and and it's, it's a team effort. It's a real orchestra in terms of all the way along the supply chain, how to maximize, you know, the health benefits. I the love that it all started with you wanting your wife to have healthy.

Yes. Coffee? Yes. She drinks. She drinks as much coffee she likes. Now that and it's and it's endorsed. Yeah. That's right, that's right. Exactly right. So what do we need to look for. Like how do we know that we're, you know, when we're buying a coffee that actually meets these kinds of standards? I think that's really important points. So this the coffee is one of the most studied foods on the planet. There's over 19,000 studies on on coffee and health. So I mean incredibly well studied food. And and so the, the health benefits are pretty clear.

But one of the, the issues is that the studies are all done in coffee in general. So in other words, it's not like, pure tea. Coffee has come out with this panacea and all coffee is bad and pure tea. Coffee is great. Coffee is generally very, very good for you. And what we think we can do is we can make it even better. So the certain things and this is what, you know, I sort of think of it as a list I would give my wife, if she's traveling and she wants to get a cup of coffee and she can't, you know, get purity.

What does she look for in a coffee? And, and these are the things that I think that really matter. The first step is the coffee needs to be organic, heavily treated crop. It's really important that it's organic. The second one is that it needs to be tested, for mold and mycotoxins. It's a very easy test. In fact, this is one of my bigger frustrations that I know that this is a very important issue. Mold of mycotoxins is an important issue with okra toxin A, and certain things that can really impact are consumers.

But the test itself and the actual decision is one of the easiest decisions we've ever had to make. A container of coffee costs about $200 to test that container, by sampling it, to make sure that it is, a mold and mycotoxins free. Everybody should be doing that every consumer should be asking for. I want to know that this coffee is mycotoxins free and go with coffee companies and importers that have that standard, so that's really important. I think that it needs to be specialty grade. So specialty grade means the highest grade of coffee.

The reason why needs to be specialty grade is because the certain things inside a specialty grade that show that there's an absence of these things, like there's an absence of of moldy beans, there's absence of green beans, which are underwrite beans, there's an absence of insect damage or chipped beans or broken beans. The reason why all of this sort of matters is because when you put it in the roaster, it'll have a direct impact to the health benefit of the coffee. So, for example, take a take a broken or cracked bean because the surface area is different on the bean, it'll scorch of a different temperature.

So what you'll you'll do is you'll create patches in that particular bean. And so the cross-contamination means that you're already affecting more of the coffee than you would like to. So the greatest importance, I would get a medium roast coffee

Customer Results and Industry Standards 19:30

as a standard, a medium roast coffee to light, and you have high levels of acrylamide to dark. You have higher levels of lead. And you also what you want to care about is the antioxidants in the coffee so that the absence of bad stuff, very important presence of good stuff. That's where the health benefits come from. So no company that we know of that we're aware of tests for cGAS and announces the cGAS apart from us in the coffee. So you want to find a coffee. There's a medium roast. It's more likely to have the most cGAS than a medium roast with the most antioxidants, and less of the bad stuff on either.

Either shoulder had no idea that the level of roasting actually changed the quality of the coffee. This is brilliant. The level of roasting is in this case. I mean, we can do everything right up to that point. We can do it, get a fantastic coffee for you, but if it's roasted in a poor way, then you lose a lot of the antioxidants in the coffee, or you create some of the negative compounds, and the freshness of the coffee makes a big difference as well. So one of the one of the issues with coffee is that it doesn't have a sort of a shelf life where people say, oh, it's a month old and we need to to retire.

This coffee is allowed to have a very long shelf life, and the lipids or the oils on the coffee can become rancid. So the cafe stall or the cow, we oh, which of the oils on the coffee become rancid? And so people have a lot of sensitivity to that. So the freshness of the coffee and the days after the roast are very important. So I mean, there's there's a lot more guidance on that. Like is a are there things to actually know. Yeah. How fresh it is and what's the best way to store it. So my advice to my wife would be, not to buy commercial coffee.

And to look for that for especially great coffee typically, you know, frequent your your local coffee roaster is doing a good job as getting a good single origin coffee in a lot of cases. And is unlikely to then, you know, you want to look for the roast by date. We've had this dilemma inside of our company, which is the roast buy or Best Buy date, because what we do is we nitrogen flush our bags, which means that it's a there's an inert gas inside of the bag and it's fresh until you open the bag.

Most coffee companies don't do that. So for us it doesn't matter. Yep. So by putting the nitrogen in you make it last longer. So the date may not mean so much. It doesn't stale so it'll gas which is what you want the coffee to do. But it won't stale because it's not exposed to oxygen. And so because it's not exposed to watch oxygen. There's a thing called the rule of 15, which is it's, it's not 100% accurate, but it's it's close enough for a sort of like a guideline which is that green coffee is fresh for about 15 months.

Roasted coffee is fresh for 15 days after you've opened the bag. But ground coffee is fresh for 15 minutes because the surface area. So that's one of the reasons why we don't sell ground coffee, because our issue is that if you buy ground coffee, that first pot of coffee will be very fresh and high in antioxidants. The second part, whatever we do, means that it's starting to stale or staining at a very high level, and we're losing the freshness of the lipids on the coffee. So by small bags, unrestored, you know that quickly after you open it and make itself as good specialty coffee shop and just and ask them when the coffee was roasted.

So you want to get fresh coffee, just like bright, fresh coffee that was recently roasted within about 15 days. And and and preferably organic and, you know, specialty grade. I've learned so much. I'm a tea drinker, too. Yeah, but this is enough to make me want to go start drinking some coffee. Yeah. And it's really interesting. Watch how your body feels like. So I had to be a convert for coffee as well. And over the time, I started to recognize that some coffees made me feel great and other coffees made me feel awful.

And so, you know, jitters, nervousness that sort of thing in the time that I usually drink coffee is if I'm at a conference and I, you know, have that just sitting and listening, consuming information and it definitely helps with my focus. But that's exactly what I've observed. Sometimes I feel fine. Drinking it in another time is also good. Yeah, yeah. It's this little interplay between what's good for you and what's bad for you. So typically if you have a, let's say, poor quality coffee, the caffeine gives you a lift.

But the toxins in the coffee, after about an hour or so, you start to recognize it in your body. So if you feel jittery, nervous, acid reflux, any of the sort of problems that sometimes people equate to coffee, it's really should be equated to bad coffee. It's not something that you should experience with a good cup of coffee. Well, now you've spoiled me. I'm going to have to travel with my own coffee.

How to Choose Better Coffee 24:30

But I do. Do. It. So, any other tips that you want to share for our listeners to help them navigate the coffee and health landscape? I think, you know, your listeners are sort of like the canary in the mine. I mean, you have the sensitivity to, some of the defects. We don't know today, honestly. What what the problems are with coffee that cause the reactions that people have. We just make every decision based on health. So all of the things we talked about, and we know that the end result is people feel a lot better drinking our coffee.

But but what's interesting is if if we could as consumers drive behaviors in the coffee industry, it will only be healthy. I mean, the rising tide. Everyone is going to benefit from us asking for higher quality standards. And it has to start with you talking to your roaster, but where you buy your coffee from demanding higher quality coffee, and also the roaster will then talk to the importer to say we want to have testing for all the Microsoft toxins. It's not expensive. We need to know that it's free from all the mycotoxins.

And that's just a very basic step. I think all of us can do. And let that driving driving change all the way back to the to the producers. Yeah. That's right. And then the farmers also will understand that it's important because the importers of the coffee will say, we have to meet this requirement, and we're going to do, a sample on source of this particular coffee. If it tests high in mold or mycotoxins, we're going to reject the order. The really interesting thing is like some of the mycotoxins like Okotoks and A in Europe, they have standards for that.

In Asia they have standards for that. In the US. The FDA has no standards for, a toxin high in coffee, which means that the coffee that's likely to not reach the standards in Europe and Asia will reach the no standards of the US. That's pretty disappointing. Yeah, yeah. And it's you know, there's the concept of food as medicine. I mean, we feel like, you know, that's our philosophy as a company is that, you know, we want to do everything to recognize that this is an incredibly good for you plant medicine, that we should focus on the health benefits.

Well said. Well, so how do people find it? Kind of purity. So I think we've got a code for people. It's, so if you go to purity coffee.com and then forward slash mode summit the Co, the code is mold 23 and it's a 40% off the first purchase. So that's a pretty good way of testing out and a personal guarantee if it doesn't work for you we'll give you a full refund as well. I mean, we're not you know, everybody's body is different and reacts in a different way. You know, give us a try. And if you have a coffee that works for you, keep on drinking it.

It's great, you know. Well, thank you so much. This is exciting to see. An important industry changing. Yeah, I hope so, I hope so. It's it's the next, next level we have. Yes. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you. It was my pleasure.