Hidden Benefits of Coffee No One Expected

Introduction to Coffee and Health 0:00

You know, coffee is one of everyone's favorite topics, I think, and it's one of mine as well. And I think there's a lot of misconceptions about coffee, because there's a lot of studies actually done on coffee that's showing beneficial things for the brain. And I'm not talking about caffeine or caffeine itself is controversial, but actual real coffee has been shown to be beneficial for the brain. So I want to distinguish the discussion between coffee and caffeine. We're talking about actual coffee today.

The good brown liquid gold that they like to drink. So there's no one better to talk about coffee than Andrew Salisbury. He's a fantastic friend of mine, and he originally spoke at one of my lecture events in 2017. Where we don't really deep into, coffee, which can be found on my YouTube. So, Andrew is the founder and CEO of Pure Tea Coffee and believes that drinking healthier coffee is one of the easiest things you can do to really improve your wellness and performance longevity. Now, Andrew's team has interviewed hundreds of professionals and doctors and dietitians that really take in coffee into from, from just a beverage into the field of potentially a health system.

And that's what I want to talk about today. There's a huge disconnect between coffee and health. And I really want Andrew and I to kind of go into this discussion. So I can't wait to introduce him. So one of the great things about, coffee and his company, our Purity Coffee, is that during the pandemic, they were shipping coffee to, you know, health care practitioners to really, improve the way that they're able to deliver, health care. So it's just fabulous company. So, join me in welcoming Andrew to the stage.

Well, listen, welcome to the show. Thanks for being here. Appreciate you. My pleasure. Thank you. You know, a few years ago. Gosh, this, I guess, must have been 4 or 5 years ago. You came down to Houston? To one of my lectures.

What Makes Coffee Healthy or Harmful 2:25

We have for physicians. And, we recorded a YouTube video that was very popular. It's all about coffee, and I. My mind was blown during that conversation. And so, this this is the better Brain health summit. So we're going to be really focusing on the brain, and the benefits that coffee can potentially bring. But let's start with the age old question that everyone asks is coffee healthy? What do you think? Well, obviously I'm a little bit biased. Having a coffee company and, having a company that's focused on the health benefits of coffee.

So. But, you know, my answer is a resounding yes. But I think there's some caveats to this, which is that, when you think about most food, as you know, I mean, it's very difficult to say one, food is good for you or bad for you any more. Now, if you talk about salmon farm raised or is it wild salmon? If it's if it's steak, is it is it grass fed or is it corn fed? I mean, everything comes with a little bit of disclaimer. So. Right. I believe strongly that coffee is a natural superfood. It's one of the highest, sources of antioxidants in the American diet.

But at the same time, there's some practices in coffee that, minimize the health benefits of the coffee. So, you know, sometimes mold and mycotoxins is an issue in coffee. You want to make sure that it's, it's free of those sort of contaminants. Heavy metals. Your coffee needs to be fresh. It absolutely needs to be organic. So, you know, there's a caveat to that, but but if your coffee is roasted in a, in a medium roast, ideally, and they pay attention to the antioxidants in the coffee, I mean, it's probably one of the best foods that you can know best, drinks that you can have for you for long term health and longevity.

Well, amazing. Listen, we've had purity coffee in my kitchen, in my parent's house right now, downstairs in my mom's kitchen. That's. That's all we have, right? It's the only thing that makes all of us, feel good. My sense of calm, no jitteriness and stuff like that. What contributes to sort of these sort of side effects of coffee that we hear about? Yeah, it's a really interesting question, because people often feel that the side effects that are associated with coffee, like, you know, stomach, acid, stomach, you know, just the sort of the jitters, nervousness, cold sweats, that sort of thing as a result of coffee.

And it's not a result of coffee as a result of bad coffee. So if you're getting those responses because you're not drinking coffee of a good enough quality. So if your coffee is high in, antioxidants and none of the sort of the negative downsides, you shouldn't experience any of those, those side effects. We don't really know what exactly contributes to those side effects, because we make every decision based on health and it's removal of lots of these things like, you know, it's no pesticides on the coffee.

It needs to be organic. So some people are reacting to pesticide residue on coffee. Some people are reacting to coffee. That's, the status of the lipids on the coffee. Caffe cafecito carry all those sort of lipids on the coffee are really rancid. You know, if your coffee is over 15 days old, then you're drinking rancid. 15. So maybe 25 days, you're drinking rancid, lipids on the coffee. So there's a lot of things that contribute to the, to the side effects of coffee, but really that all of those things can be avoided in the sourcing.

And the roasting of the coffee. Right. Absolutely. And, about three years ago, I actually did a talk over here in Baylor College of Medicine, Department of Neurosurgery, with people that have gone through strokes, and brain hemorrhages and, for that talk, we actually talk about superfoods and what kept coming up whenever I did my searches and literature searches is coffee and how beneficial it is for the brain. Now, I started with post-stroke, and there's evidence showing that about five cups of coffee per day had beneficial effect on something called reperfusion penumbra.

So in basic, layman's terms, what that means is that after stroke, there's an area of the brain that doesn't have blood supply to it, and it kind of dies off. Right? But there's there's a transition area where it's still salvageable. So, there's evidence showing that coffee, like drinking coffee, can actually increase the blood flow

Coffee, Brain Health, and Stroke Recovery 7:00

to the salvageable areas, which is very fascinating. And then that got me into a lot of other neurocognitive disorders, from memory loss and Alzheimer's disease and parkinsonism. And so, you know, obviously there's something going on in coffee and that makes sense because there's antioxidants and stuff like that. But but there are also studies of negative effects on coffee, but most of those are looking at, very nonspecific things and habits. And there's a lot of confounders in those studies because a lot of those people smoked.

In fact, there's one study that's just done on truckers. And so a lot of those, not not seeing truckers are bad in any way, shape or form, but it's a very specific population, right. And so, there's a lot of things that are really out there and, and, you know, one of the reasons I have you on this summit is to really dispel a lot of those myths. So what is it? So earlier you said that sometimes you can get these effects, these sort of bad effects from bad coffee, like, besides, like, you know, toxins in coffee House grown like, what makes a coffee actually, like, good.

And what makes it really good? And how the heck do we know? Yeah, I think there's probably two factors to look at that one is the absence of bad stuff and the other is the presence of good stuff. So what you want the most of is the chlorogenic acids, the chlorogenic lectins, Dragone, the lean cafecito, Kawi, all of these very, sort of impactful positive compounds that are present in coffee. And so the only way for you to feel good good grades. Right. Those are the good things you listed. Absolutely.

That they're the good things that are available in coffee and the reasons why, you know, it's anti-inflammatory and and there's a lot of health benefits associated with those. But the issue is that the amounts of chlorogenic acids. So let's just focus on this one thing. The biggest antioxidants in coffee is chlorogenic acid. That varies from crop to crop, harvest to harvest, region to region. It depends on rainfall. It depends on the soil quality depends on lots of different factors. So one of the first things you have to do is you you can't possibly know which farm is going to produce the most chlorogenic acids in their coffee in any given season without first testing for all of the, the Asian coffee.

So the very first step is that you we test around, you know, 50 to 60 coffees. Rule is, an ongoing sort of testing, protocol with our coffees to find the ones that are highest in antioxidants. So that's the first step. I mean, make sure your coffee has the most amount of antioxidants. I mean, we did a test of the top 49 brands of coffee in the US, and one of the one of the brands, I won't name them, but it was a very high end, organic coffee and really great tasting coffee. And we had ten times the antioxidants of that particular coffee, which means if you care about antioxidants, you had to drink 40 cups of that coffee in order to, to get the same benefit of four cups of, so the antioxidant level is very important.

And then also the way that the coffee is roasted maintains or destroys the antioxidants in the coffee. So you have to pay attention to the roasting curve. It's not about turning green coffee brown and making it tasty. It's about keeping the antioxidants in the coffee when you roast. And the only way to do that is to design a roasting curve for every harvest of coffee is specific to that coffee to maintain the antioxidants in the coffee, it's pretty complicated. It's sort of is it's it's I mean, it is complicated in the sense that, there's a lot of decisions.

But because our Northstar is very clear, we're really focused on every decision based on help, not compromising in any way. You know, a lot of these decisions, while they're a little complicated, they're easy into define, which is the winner. And, you know, which is the best decision for all coffee companies or coffee branches do third party testing for for toxins and stuff. No, no. Okay. Unfortunately. And you know, what's interesting is there's different standards, in different countries. So the standards for, let's say Okotoks and a which is obviously a very negative, compound that is a mycotoxins that comes from, from mold, is a is a lot higher in terms of what they're allowing in, in Europe.

I mean, not not sorry a lot lower. The standards are much better in Europe than they are in the US.

How Coffee Quality Affects Side Effects 11:30

So you often find coffee that has some of these problems just being diverted to to the US. So standards are really important. And and you've you probably heard this for years. There's a lot of talk about mycotoxins mold in coffee you know popularized by bulletproof. What I don't understand is this is one of the cheapest tests in the world is $150 to test a container and find out whether your coffee has mycotoxins in. But people don't do that because they don't want to know the answer. So, I mean, the test is easy there.

It's very easy to put a label on your bag and say it's tested for mycotoxins. It doesn't have any in the coffee, but there's not much motivation to do it. And so the customer says we're demanding it. We're demanding the you you show us that our coffee doesn't have these negative values. Well, that's interesting because, you know, I think for, for me, like any coffee, depending on the way that we store it at home, I mean, if it's left out in the open, you can see mold start growing on those things.

Right. So does home storage matter as well? Yeah, the storage of the coffee matches and how quickly you use it so. Well, one of the decisions we made early on is we nitrogen flush all of our bags. So we roast the coffee nitrogen and flush it, which means that, it's an inert gas and it's going to be fresh until the moment you open the bag. That's not always the case. In a lot of cases, coffee comes in, you know, a paper bag or just a bag you buy in the store is not much and flushed. And the issue that you got with that is it will typically stale within about 15 to 20 days after roasting.

So even on the store side, if your bag isn't nitrogen flush, then the problem is you could have gone off with there's already stale and the industry uses sort of like this sort of, this Best Buy don't. And typically the best Buy date is a year from when the coffee was roasted, because they're not required to say that the coffee is stale because people are looking at coffee for the health benefits. So, you know, even buying it at the store, you can have some issues. The way you store the coffee has has some issues.

Airtight containers are much better. Obviously go to a large coffee brands, whether it's Starbucks or whatever it is. Right. So can donuts. What is the average time between when the coffee is roasted to when it's in the store and they sell it to me? It's difficult to say, but you're talking. You're measuring it in months. Not in days. I mean, you measure, you're measuring it beyond the level of of of when the coffee, when you're losing the the antioxidants in coffee are relatively strong and they, they still a presence after that period of scaling.

The problem you've got is the lipids on the coffee, the oils on the coffee. They become rancid. So if you ever see your coffee beans, you see them bright and shiny and they look really nice. That's actually a bad sign. Unless it was literally just roasted a day ago. So either end of the spectrum, if it was roasted a day ago, you're going to see a certain amount of lipids on the coffee. But if you're seeing lipids on the coffee and you, you, you can imagine that coffee is at least a month old. You're seeing stale lipids, but so.

Well, the reason I asked you that, earlier we talked about how, you know, the the longer you are from consuming the coffee after the roasted, the more likely that if it's stored either improperly or just regularly, I guess that you can accumulate some of these toxins, on the coffee in the coffee, because the coffee bean becomes rancid. Right? And so if the average chain is, giving coffee or selling coffee, months after it's roasted, that doesn't make me feel very good necessarily about going to, to those places, right?

Mentally and physically. Because, I mean, you know, when you drink the coffee, you'll notice it in your body. And that's what we encourage people to do. Just pay attention to how you feel. Have a cup of coffee. If you if you don't feel, good and energy if there's a crash a couple of hours later, if you've got, you know, sort of jitters and nervousness, it's all a reflection of the fact that you just ingested something which wasn't good for your body. So you're saying that any sort of crashes and side effects and stuff like that may not be from just coffee in general, but from the either the brand or however the coffee is stored.

And the quality of that coffee. Correct? Absolutely is a reflection of the quality of coffee. So if it's not a reflection of coffee itself or coffee is handled in the right way, if it's organic, if it's if it's roasted in the right way to keep maintain the antioxidants tested to be free of heavy metals and that sort of thing, you shouldn't really get any of those side effects. And, and, and I sort of know this now after I mean, when we first, we first met, we had the first sort of years of purity, but but now we've got nearly 21,000, five star testimonials, and which is a great, actually.

But more than that, it's the, the a lot of our customers have started reporting the absence of side effects. So at least 25% of our customers and our testimonials say I can drink coffee again, I don't have these side effects, I don't have these problems. And we didn't know it was a sort of one of these, sort of surprises for us that we we made every decision based on health, but the end result is people could actually feel the difference under if, you know, because a lot of times when we drink coffee, we go to different places and Starbucks and stuff like that.

I think our taste buds are kind of used to, the coffee

Roast Levels, Antioxidants, and Coffee Chemistry 17:00

and even like Folgers, I drink Folgers grown up, actually, and stuff like that. And, and sometimes it's really hard to kind of change behavior. Right. But there's definitely a taste that is completely different. And now that, you know, I've had good coffee for a number of years, I can tell. But before I'm like, now everything kind of tastes the same. But this is very different. It's more it's fruitier. It feels a lot lighter. Even though that, you know, it tastes lighter, there's less bitterness.

But the effects on my brain, my ability to focus and concentration and wakefulness is actually a whole lot better. Whereas before I'm like, you know, the black woman, the darker the coffee, the better it is for me. So, so can you kind of comment on, like, the dark rose versus blond rose, like rose, medium rose, whatever it is and how that really impacts the health benefits of coffee. Yeah. And the first thing I would say is that it is very intentional how you you've got a sort of tasting coffee that feels like it's a strong sort of taste.

You recognize it, you know, Folgers, Maxwell House, that sort of thing. And the reason is that if you're Starbucks, you've got a problem, which is that you're buying coffee from all over the world and lots of different regions, and it all tastes differently. Sauce. What you want to do is make sure that the experience for your customer in Singapore is the same as your experience. The customer in in Seattle. So the only way to do that when you've got to, you know, variety of different coffee is to roast it to a level where it all tastes the same, like you have a of steak, it tastes like a burn, a steak it doesn't, you know, you're not really so burning the coffee to the point where you're roasting away a lot of the antioxidants creates a uniform taste in the coffee.

And that's what people come to recognize. A lot of people come to recognize as coffee, but it's not. It's it's really burnt coffee. And the issue with that is that if you had a roasting curve, if you looked at a cup of coffee while you were ramping up your speed, heat and time, and you were roasting the coffee in the early stage of roasting, you create a thing called acrylamide, which is, as you know, is carcinogenic. And proposition 65 is there's a focus on the amount of acrylamide we have in our food.

That's based on the roasting of any carbohydrate. It's a maillard reaction that drops off relatively quickly in the first stage of roasting. But if your coffee is very likely roasted, you'll have higher levels of acrylamide. And depending on the technology used for roasting, that can also create different levels of acrylamide in the coffee. Then as you roast the coffee, the antioxidants start to drop off. So the very dark roasted coffee, while it's got a uniform taste, and we all recognize that as the taste of coffee or a lot of people recognize as the taste of coffee, you're roasting away the antioxidants.

The longer you roast the coffee so that very dark tasting coffee has very few antioxidants in it, then you create a thing called, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which is, you know, is like from any bone food. You create that, coffee and so that's a little bit of the balancing act. It's a little bit of a, of a play between science and, science and alchemy and art. If you want to create a great tasting coffee, but you also want to maximize the antioxidants in the coffee and not creating negative compounds.

So, yeah, so too like high acrylamide also neurotoxin, the seeds are taking away the beneficial effects. So there's somewhere in the middle right. And so and so when when we don't have access to like purity coffee for example. Right. Let's say, you know, when I'm at you in New York or traveling and you usually bring your own coffee, but you didn't that day. So what are the things that you do? What roast do you, do you do you purchase when you're traveling and stuff like that? Yeah. I love this question because, I've thought a lot about it.

If my wife is traveling, what do I suggest that she drinks if she can't get pretty? So the first thing is, if you go into a coffee shop and the problem is, the more you define your coffee, the less obviously available that coffee is. You can go into a coffee shop and and give them a shopping list of all the things you care about, and they're going to look at you pretty funny. But the basic things would be this you want a good quality specialty coffee, so you want. And the specialty coffee means it's the highest grade of coffee, which means it has the least amount of defects in the coffee.

There's a concept called primary defects. And they're things like broken beans or insect damage. So the specialty coffee has the least amount of those. And there's a measurement for that. And it's very defined. So specialty coffee needs to be organic. Coffee is treated in countries in the world that don't have the same level of regulations as the US when it comes to the type of fertilizers are used on coffee. So things like Enda soften and glyphosate, you know, are often used on coffee crops. And it's not just bad for the farmers, but it's bad for the people who consume the coffee.

So organic, especially grade. It's very unlikely, unfortunately, that you will find a coffee that has been tested to be free of mycotoxins, but you'll limit your risk if you're getting specialty grade coffee. It's not completely avoiding that risk, but you're limiting your risk. And then you would want a coffee that's medium roast. The reason I suggest medium roast is because the, the, the roast level is, is called 55 actually. And that's a color measurement of a roast level of coffee that's really just in the middle of that, of coffee because you're not going to create, the acrylamide or most of the acrylamide is going to be, burnt away.

And the pH is one of developed. So you're looking for a medium roast, organic, especially great coffee that was roasted freshly. I mean, so, you know, you need a coffee that's been roasted within 15 days, and that's probably the basics. And that's that's a good place to start.

Choosing Better Coffee When Traveling 23:00

Yeah. You know. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And so the word specialty item on the bag, that's, that's like a standardized definition. Or do people just put on the bags some fancy. No, it's a standardized definition that you should look for. And it, and it it's based on taste. So, there's a cupping scoring coffee, so, you know, very good coffee. Use a cup to 90 and above and excellent coffees, the ones that you would pay, you know, $50 a bag for, especially grade is 85 points and above. And it's all based on a flavor wheel, and it's based on the taste of the coffee.

But the good thing is, it's a great indicator that your coffee is being treated well. So even though we're not focused on taste and, you know, taste great, taste is a byproduct of good coffee. But it's not our primary North Star getting coffee that's only specialty grade means that it doesn't come with any of the damage. The coffee typically comes with or a lower grade of coffee. So you can actually ask for and look for specialty grade coffee. You know, you mentioned damage and this is interesting.

So I didn't I didn't know about this. But they're they're different coffee brands that we do buy. And whenever the bag is opened, one has a lot more like broken beans and stuff, in it and generally cheaper brands, because we buy, you know, holdings and then the, and then, you know, something like purity and some other specialty great. Brands don't like what is like what? Why why are these things even broken in the first place? Versus like, the specialty trade where the beans are broken. It a lot to do with, with cost of production.

So the problem with coffee is, is often treated as a commodity. Right. So if it's treated like a commodity, like salt is how do we drive the cost down of producing this coffee and have a good enough product because they're only paid based on their price. So a lot of times farmers are not compensated for going the extra mile. So if you look at some of the technology that is around coffee processing, it's all designed to keep the costs low, but it's not designed to, to provide a great quality cup of coffee.

So I'll give you an example. One of the things that we really rally against is, industrial farming of coffee. So a lot of your coffee that you're going to buy is farmed industrially. And that would mean that there's rows of coffee trees just sort of like, you know, in a winery, there's just, you know, rows and rows of trees and a tractor goes in between the trees, sort of like a inverted U-shaped tractor and basically shakes the trees and shakes off all the berries on the trees. So it's shaking off the the unripe berries, the overwrite berries, and the just ripe berries, as well as twigs and stones and that sort of thing onto a mat below.

And then it's picked up and then it's processed. It's just cheaper to do that, to do industrial picking, than it is to do handpicked, hand-selected coffee. So we only buy hand-picked hand-selected coffee because the farmer can pick out just the coffee that is either red or orange that is perfectly ripe. So you're not getting any of the damaged beans, but industrial farming creates all of this sort of damaged beans that they they may or may not sort for afterwards, depending on the quality of the coffee.

Okay, so let's talk about the farmer for a second. I think that's a very important topic to really bring up, because anything that's a that's a commodity, whether it's salt or sugar or fruit, the farmer gets, gets basically not the best end of the deal, right. And and I, and I would imagine coffee would be the same. And this topic came up, when I was visiting a friend in Miami, and he's from Colombia. And he visited Colombia and he went to, coffee farm. And he noticed that, like, in their cupboard is actually Folgers, but they're actually providing, like, handpicked specialty Craig coffee.

And he realized that they've never tasted their own coffee before.

Coffee Farming, Processing, and Farmer Incentives 27:00

Ever. And this is the fourth generation of coffee farmers. You talk about. You know, that doesn't make sense to me. Can you talk about sort of the experience, what the farmers experience are like? Yeah, I think it's, I think there's a good, healthy trend and, you know, we're pushing that trend with, with your help, that people are starting to recognize that coffee can be good for health, but they also need to understand that the quality of the coffee matters a lot when you're talking about coffee, that's good for health.

So on the very high end of coffee, on especially great coffee, the farmers are paid a very good, income. They set the price for that coffee. It's not based on your export. It's based on the quality of that coffee. So and very high end farmers, they're going to be tasting their coffee. They're going to be cupping it. They know what product they have that. But on the low end it's really just volume. It's just volume of coffee. And so taste doesn't become a factor because customers are not demanding the taste or health benefits of the coffee.

And so, you know, there are two distinct groups of coffee farmers. There's the that is the artisan, the coffee farmers that are producing really good quality coffee. And then there's also the commodity coffee, which is, you know, lower standard and they're less concerned. They're less concerned about quality. And if they are concerned about quality, they're more concerned about just the taste of the coffee, not the health benefits. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. Makes sense. So, you know, going back into, the health benefits and the antioxidants.

So there's a lot of supplements and that's marketed as breakouts. And almost each one of them has, has some sort of extract from coffee or green tea and stuff like that. And so and they're not cheap. And so, so obviously there's a lot that's within coffee that's that's very valuable. What is it going to take, do you think, to get people to realize that coffee can be healthy, especially specialty coffee can be healthy? Yeah. And what what does the awareness really need to look like? Because I feel like with purely coffee over the last few years, you guys are really the only company talking about very significant benefits from a very scientific basis.

It's not just a very general basis, but from a very scientific basis. What's it going to take to get there? It's it's slow to move. I've really been saying this for since I started, since I started purity, I felt like there was a massive disconnect between what the scientific community knows about the health benefits of coffee, what general public knows. I mean, as you've seen, it's just there's just a big information gap. And so we're trying to close that gap. But a lot of it is also, it's it's it's it's awareness of certain compounds.

The problem is, as you can see, it's a complicated business and it's a complicated it's complicated in the sense that there's lots of different decisions that you have to, you have to take with, with, with no compromise. And so it's not the easiest business for people to want to start. And I think what we're starting to see now, though, is a trend where people are recognizing that coffee is good for health and then making that next question, which is, you know, okay, if it's good for health, what makes it good for my health?

And then they when they start digging deeper, they recognize, you know, the health benefits. A lot of what we're doing right now, the next level, what we just as I mentioned earlier, we just bought a farm in Colombia. We're taking that next step, which is what can we do on a soil level, on a cultivar level, so that we can actually dial up specific compounds that we know have health benefits. So, you know, in the case of, just general health benefits as chlorogenic acid. Claudia, etic like tones, which can be developed more in the roast, is very good for brain health in terms of the blood brain barrier.

You know, we're just playing around with University of Brazil. And also just a great team of people and some doctors like yourself looking at, you know, what we could do. You know, our standing joke is, you know, is the idea of getting the farmer the roast, and the scientist all in a room together and just, just deciding what really matters when it comes to the health benefits of coffee. And that's sort of the next level of, for us. But that's really exciting. Because I think historically, most of the health benefits and coffee has been studied in animals.

Not really, until the last 3 or 4 years that there's tons of human data out there.

Building a Health-Focused Coffee Company 31:30

Now, there's one that was published, I think, 2017 to 2019, a randomized control trial looking at, six month data of quality of life and those people with memory loss and neurocognitive issues, and they found significant functional improvements, in the group with the coffee. And so it's absolutely fascinating what we're seeing now in the studies are doing now transitioning from animal to to human studies. And it's really exciting that you guys are working with university Brazil and especially, you know, at the soil level to really improve their antioxidant effect.

That's that's absolutely fantastic. Yeah, it's it's super interesting. I'm very excited in the next few years because I think we're doing something that hasn't been done before. There's a lot of coffee companies that have to buy farms to increase the, to reduce the cost of production or to improve flavor. But I think we're the only coffee company that's bought a farm to create a lab farm for coffee and health. So that's a very interesting development. So like you said, you guys have a North Star.

And that's where the health benefits of coffee you think other companies are don't really have the as a primary focus right now. Do you think that as we go on and as, we get this, the word's out there, do you think that coffee can be considered into, the the idea of not just, you know, food as medicine, but the idea that, big institutions, American Heart Association, etc., etc. is going to be promoting these benefits because obviously we're seeing human studies that have really positive impacts.

Or is that already going on? It's going on in other countries. It's, it's, it's much more prevalent in the UK, for example, like the the liver condition is really just really pushing the health benefits of coffee. The problem is, you know, as you know, we certainly can't make any health claims about a food like we, you know, it's not FDA approved. We can't make health claims. So even though we're moving in that direction, there's certain things that we just can't say. And, you know, we we so in a way, it's really we're just making every decision based on health.

And our customers need to, you know, sort of dig a little deeper into what we're doing, to understand, you know, what we're trying to do in terms of specific ailments. The coffee can help with. But one of the things we came out with just recently is our first coffee called protect, which is being, formulated for liver vitality. So it's all about the liver. So we made every decision based on liver and that's, you know, that's been very well-received. So, you know, it's, it's a new trend for us. So, my answer to your question is, I really hope so.

I hope people start becoming more aware of the health benefits of coffee, I think, and also to understand that there's many things that that can affect the the health benefits of coffee. And also it's one of these things that it's almost like, do no harm. You know, the majority of Americans, 164 Americans wake up this morning and they drink a cup of coffee. If they're going to do that anyway, it's a 2% shift to make an adjustment to a better quality coffee for their health. And I hope that people will start paying more attention not just to us, but to other coffee companies that are doing a great job with quality coffee.

Oh that's amazing. And so my final question for you is, how how did you get into the space? Yeah, it was a really interesting I'll give you the shorter version of the story, but, I was in the software industry in Latin America. I built a business and sold it, and, I took some time off with my wife and, and daughter, and my wife started having some health issues and very low energy, difficult to get out of bed in the morning. And she was doing what a lot of us do, and she was overcaffeinated and using coffee as a crux to sort of like get us through a day.

So I was a tea drinker. So eight, eight years, nine years ago I was a tea drinker. I just never drank coffee. I just didn't like the taste. It wasn't really my focus. And so I was trying to persuade that to stop drinking coffee and, to win an argument. So I actually, I met two professors at the Institute of Coffee Studies in Vanderbilt, and, and I started talking to them about, okay, you know, is coffee good for you? And they just gave me this long shopping list of all the health benefits of coffee, and and I just I'd never seen such a big information gap between, as we said, what the scientific community knows and what the general public know.

And I initially started the business more as a project. I spent nearly two years on research and development, just trying to understand if we could actually impact the health benefits of coffee or impact the quality of the coffee, if we only focused on health. And I didn't really think that I was going to be the right person to take the business. Beyond that, I thought I was just build it up, create a business plan, and then,

The Future of Coffee as a Health Category 36:30

you know, sell it on to another company that would have more of a bandwidth to, to develop this and deliver it, you know, to, to the US. But, in the end, it just it came one step after another. I just kept taking the next step. And now I think I'm fully committed. Yeah, well, you got to be part about it, so take it to this direction. I mean, no one's really done anything like this before. Have, really intense focus on health, on a product that's supposed to be a commodity, right? Yeah. And so, so it's, So it's incredible.

All right, five years from now, where do you see yourself, or do you see priority? What is the role of purity? I think the sort of the, the real litmus test of success is, is this for me? I think that there's three main drivers of why people buy coffee today. They buy it based on taste, specialty coffee. They buy it based on convenience with K-Cups or going to your local Starbucks. They buy it. And by my taste, they buy based on convenience and they buy it based on, cost. So, you know, you go to a gas station, you get cheaper coffee there.

You know, that the three main drivers of coffee, I think if people knew what I know about the health benefits of coffee, there would be a fourth reason. And the fourth reason is health. And so if we're successful, if this this movement is successful, and I see it as almost like the fourth wave of coffee, people will recognize the health benefits of coffee and start making that decision based on health. So I think there's a long way to go. I think we're on the first step of the, of the latter. I don't think anyone else is making every decision based on health, but I think this market will become very busy, and I really hope it does.

I hope that there's 50 companies in this market making decisions based on health and providing consumers great quality coffee for health. And I think that's a success. I think, you know, if if coffee and health is a driver for why you choose your cup of coffee, we will have done some, done some good. You know, those people will bring them. Mental health is and just should be a driver. In fact, everything that goes into the budget of your driver consider with health under the the primary consideration.

Listen, I want to thank you for being on today. And, for those of you who are listening, who are watching, who wants to learn more, go to Purity coffee.com. Check out the pretty coffee and intro. Not actually. Our YouTube video is still up. It's quite popular. So we've used our community coffee and my name chain around. You'll see our interview. It's actually broken down into different segments, as well as the full name that's available as well. When we get into our conversations even longer. On the interview and, we broke it down into even more things as well.

But I want to thank you for being on, how can people find you? Go to Purity coffee.com and, and check out our site and, ordered online. You can also order it now on Amazon if you if you want to do that once. And, one of the great things about Purity Coffee website is that there is a whole section on the science behind all this, which I really love. So you you are a coffee. If you're passionate about coffee, coffee, nerd, go ahead and check it out. Thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it.

Thank you. For.