Safely Drinking Coffee Again with MCAS and Histamine Intolerance

So really hope that you’ll stick with me through this interview ’cause you’re gonna be excited about some of the information we’re gonna share. We have with us Andrew Salisbury, founder of Purity Coffee, and I wanna tell you just a little bit about him. He’s gonna dive into a lot of the science with us. And he began his unique relationship with coffee through some similar journeys that we’ve all had here. His wife, Amber, suffered from low energy and adrenal fatigue, diminished vitality, and they worked so hard on trying to improve her chronic fatigue. And she had turned to coffee, like so many of us do, and caffeine for more energy and for the solution. And then that’s what led them to start to discover how to produce the healthiest coffee in the world. And Andrew was really influenced by the Vanderbilt Institute’s Center for Coffee Studies about the health benefits of coffee, which is now believed to be one of the healthiest super foods in the American diet, but many people are drinking poor quality coffee and they’re getting mycotoxins, they’re getting pesticides, they’re getting heavy metals and things that are detrimental to health. So we’re gonna talk about how to drink coffee in a way that’s a super food for your health. Welcome, Andrew. I’m so excited to have you with us.

Andrew Salisbury

It’s my pleasure. I’m excited to be here.

Beth O’Hara, FN

Can you tell us a little bit more about this journey? This is not just a business for you guys, this is a passion, and this is really a service to people’s health and that’s why I wanted to have you on with us. And I also wanna thank you for being one of our supporters of our summit because without your support, we couldn’t have gotten this out here, and we’re just so grateful for your help with this.

Andrew Salisbury

No, it’s our pleasure. Absolutely.

Beth O’Hara, FN

What happened with Amber and how did you go down this road of figuring out what’s going on with most of the coffee on the market?

Andrew Salisbury

Yeah, it was an interesting sort of story. I’d sold my business in 2011 and Amber, myself, and our daughter Leila, we traveled the world. We came back in late-2012 and she started getting some health issues and we couldn’t really figure out what it was. We did the normal standard of tests and then we went to look at different things, like naturopaths, and her diet, and how she was supplementing and that sort of thing. And we just happened to have this one sort of standing argument because, as you can probably tell, I’m English. I was a tea drinker and I’d just never drunk coffee. Very occasionally I’d have a cup of coffee at Starbucks, but really very occasionally, and Amber started drinking a lot more coffee to get out of bed in the morning and to give her the energy she needed. And one of the arguments was, I felt like she needed to cut down on her coffee consumption because a lot of the health conscious people that I was talking to at the time as we were going through this was saying, “Oh yeah, you definitely need to cut out coffee from your diet.” So this was the medical advice I was getting. And so, Amber was very resistant, as you can imagine. Her attitude was, “I’m not giving up coffee unless you prove it to me,” and so I was probably went a little further than necessary to win an argument and I met two professors at the Institute of Coffee Studies and I expected to come back just armed with great material that coffee is bad for you and she needs to give it up, and the opposite was true. They basically gave me a shopping list of the health benefits that coffee has and then we just started doing a bit of a deep dive into what made coffee healthy.

Beth O’Hara, FN

And then this kind of… One, I love this came out of the trying to convince her not to drink it and then she ends up winning the argument at the end.

Andrew Salisbury

Absolutely.

Beth O’Hara, FN

But also, then it becomes this mission for you guys to discover the healthiest coffee, which my sense of you is that when you, you’re like me, when you dive into something, you dive all the way in. So let’s start touching on what you learned along this road in terms of the problems with most of the coffee that’s out there, and and what was probably triggering her in all the coffee she was drinking.

Andrew Salisbury

Yeah, I mean, it first came about when the professors explained to me that the coffee is the number one source of antioxidants in the American diet, and they gave me a long list of potential health benefits of coffee. And as we started to dig in deeper of what was the sort of mechanistic explanation of the health benefits of coffee, they could give me a list of things that I should avoid and things that I should look for in coffee, but they couldn’t tell me of one brand that was focusing all their attention on their health benefits of coffee. So that’s really what sort started to get me curious is I realized, obviously, 164 million Americans may will wake up this morning, drink a cup of coffee, and something which potentially could be so good for you, there is nobody who’s focused on just health. And so that’s sort of where we start started looking at health as our North Star. So, it started as an agreement in the beginning that we wouldn’t compromise. We would make every decision based on health, even if it was a $200 bag of coffee that tasted like ditch water, we were gonna make every decision based on health. And that’s sort of what we did. And again, there’s a long shopping list of what you should be concerned with and that you should make sure is in your coffee.

Beth O’Hara, FN

Well fortunately, your coffee doesn’t taste like ditch water, and coming from, and I’ve got my coffee here that I’m drinking. And coming from being a coffee snob, I actually really love this coffee, and then the fact that it helps my health so much on top of that. But I always having so much trouble even with Swiss water decaf processed coffee, organic coffee, once I figured out there were a lot of pesticides in coffee. Let’s go into, what was triggering me in that coffee and what’s triggering so many people that are having trouble with coffee?

Andrew Salisbury

I think there could be a number of things, and as a doctor you’re probably aware just how different everyone’s body is and what the reactions could be. But I think the big drivers are this, first of all, coffee is the most heavily treated crop on the planet, next to cotton. So, it’s treated with pesticides, pesticides and herbicides that wouldn’t be allowed in the US because they’re cheaper in, let’s say, Latin America or other countries that produce coffee, they’re often used on the crops, which not only is bad for the farmers but also obviously bad for people who consume the coffee. So, step number one for us is , we had to find organic coffee. But as you mentioned, sometimes a coffee can be organic but it doesn’t mean that it’s high quality. I mean, if you think about fruit and vegetables when you go into a store, the organic fruit and vegetables typically isn’t the prettiest fruit and vegetables. In other words, because you’ve managed to avoid insect damage with coffee that’s treated with pesticides, it looks better and perhaps tastes even better, but we needed to find organic, specialty grade coffee, which is the highest grade of coffee available. There are two big drivers. I think then beyond that, the antioxidants in coffee make a big difference, which is the positive compounds in coffee. So sourcing for those antioxidants and roasting to maintain them is important. And then, one of the big problems with coffee is the molds, which then turns into mycotoxins, in some cases, with coffee because water is present pretty much in all levels of the supply chain. And that’s a very big issue of people who’ve got sensitivities.

Beth O’Hara, FN

So it’s really the entire chain, from how the beans are grown, to the harvesting, to the production, what kind of water is being used.

Andrew Salisbury

Absolutely.

Beth O’Hara, FN

And are metals a problem in coffee?

Andrew Salisbury

Heavy metals can be. I mean, we obviously test for things like arsenic, which can come from soil conditions and pesticides that have been used. We test for pesticide residues ’cause even if a coffee is certified to be organic, there is a risk that you’ve got runoff from other fields and other farm nearby. So that needs to be tested for. But heavy metals are definitely an issue and most often on the processing of the coffee. But, pretty much as you said, every step of the supply chain there are moments where you can fall short if you’re trying to use money as your primary factor in producing the coffee. And as a commodity, most people are driven by making the coffee as cheap as they possibly can and as long as it delivers the caffeine, then they’re fine. And so, it’s these sort of like these corners that are cut that are even cut with specialty coffee because the lens which they’re seeing the coffee through is not health, it’s through flavor. So you can have a great tasting coffee that isn’t actually very good for you because the way it was roasted, or the way that it was stored, or packaged.

Beth O’Hara, FN

And I’ve been in some of the places where they’re roasting their own coffee and gotten to do the tours, and seen the beans, and actually been kind of surprised sometimes when I looked in those bags and saw mold growing on those beans.

Andrew Salisbury

Yeah, yeah.

Beth O’Hara, FN

That’s a big issue, and I know there’s a lot of debate about mold toxins, whether they’re really coming through the food supply or not coming through the food supply. I tend to fall a little more on the side of, I don’t tend to see mold in the food supply triggering people in terms of grains, in terms of, maybe a little nuts, but coffee’s the big one. And I often see if I can get people to shift their coffee to a mold-free coffee that that alone makes a difference. So let’s talk also about histamine, because some coffees are higher histamine.

Andrew Salisbury

Yeah, and that’s actually one thing we’ve just started testing for. So, it was one of these laws of unintended consequences when we made every decision based on health, we started to get a following with people who have histamine intolerance or mast cell. And they were reporting to us that we were the only coffee that they could drink. And so now after four or five years, we’ve got around 24,000 testimonials. We are seeing a lot of anecdotal evidence of people who are saying, “We don’t know what you do with your coffee, but it isn’t reacting in the way that other coffee does.” So I would think it’s a mixture of different things. I mean, since we make every decision based on health, there’s a lot of things that I can talk about here, but I think pesticides, that being organic, I think being tested to be free of mold and mycotoxins are very important. I think also heavy metals is an issue, and surprisingly there’s a more ochratoxin A in coffee than you would expect. And it’s just something that, if you are ingesting something every single day, we joke about, coffee is the only supplement you’ll never forget to take. You’ll never forget to take your cup of coffee in the morning. Vitamin D, something else, maybe you forget, but coffee, no. And so, if it’s something that you’re doing every single day, I think it’s really important that you have a high standard for that. It has more of a leverage, I think.

Beth O’Hara, FN

Yeah, well also the supplements. There’s a lot of issues with cutting corners in supplements, quality in supplements. That mistake I made early in trying to save money, and then weren’t doing anything, or maybe making me worse because of the quality, but that’s a whole nother piece.

Andrew Salisbury

My wife did as well. That’s actually one of the first things that we changed were the quality of her supplements because I think that is a bit of a problem, that people don’t tell the difference with a supplement. You can have a great fish oil versus another fish oil, which isn’t particularly good for you, but it’s very difficult for people to actually tell in their body, one is better than the other. So it’s, quality is important.

Beth O’Hara, FN

It really is. And so one of the things that we do, we have very similar philosophies for what we do and ours is, quality comes first, health comes first. So everything that we recommend to people, I have done the due diligence. I’ve done it and dug into it all. I know, you jumped on with me when we were looking at Purity Coffee and we talked with the team, and I’m always skeptical coming in so I grill every company and I appreciate the patience with me. But you guys were so excited about it. You’re like, “Yes, let’s dig into all of this,” because it’s that same philosophy.

Andrew Salisbury

That’s right.

Beth O’Hara, FN

So I found that this is also in our practice and I’ve had people come in drinking lots of different coffees and then my big thing for them is, I need you to find a coffee that’s organic, that’s low or been tested for mycotoxins, that’s low histamine, and that is low in those heavy metals. And frequently, if we shift the coffee, if they’re not drinking this coffee, and I know you’re gonna talk about other types of coffee, like it doesn’t have to be Purity, but at least make sure you’re drinking good coffee. I see those differences in people. And the other thing I wanna share for people is that coffee is low salicylate. So we have so many people with salicylate intolerance and they feel really deprived. So when I tell them, “Well guess what? Here’s a coffee you can drink.” They’re just delighted to have something back ’cause we have so many food restrictions in this population.

Andrew Salisbury

I mean our focus… We started working with the University of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro with Professor Adriana Farrar for the first, really, first two years, before we even started the company. And we wanted to look at every decision and what mattered, and I think it falls down to two main categories. It’s the absence of bad stuff and the presence of good stuff. So coffee can be incredibly good for you, but obviously the more of the positive compounds, the antioxidants, chlorogenic acid, chlorogenic lactones, that’s really something that we focus on. But at the same time, if you are so sensitive that you can’t drink the coffee because of mold, or heavy metals, or pesticide residue, this sort of thing, so we needed to make sure that the coffee was very clean, very pure, but also highest in antioxidants. And I think our direction has all been driven by those two sorts of two sort of columns that we focus on.

Beth O’Hara, FN

And we actually did some digging in and found that studies were showing, when it’s a really pure coffee that doesn’t have the pesticides and the mycotoxins, that coffee actually has anti-tumor properties, it has anti-inflammatory properties. Some of the cell studies, these need repeating, but some of the cell studies were showing anti-allergenic properties, improvements in insulin resistant. We know that coffee helps support phase one liver detox for detoxification. It’s got brain benefits, because there’s this huge spectrum of these antioxidants and that’s why you’re calling it a superfood. We don’t hear that. We think about these super expensive things, like acai and whatever as a superfood, but superfoods don’t have to be expensive.

Andrew Salisbury

No, absolutely not. Yeah, I mean that that there really is the, probably the main crux of it is the fact that since so many people are already coffee drinkers, one of the things which is a great opportunity is just a two-degree shift or a five-degree shift to saying, “I’m gonna focus on the quality of my coffee,” because you do it every single day. And I think, as you said, it’s not about people buying Purity, it’s about understanding what matters. What’s the difference that makes the difference when you’re looking for a coffee? And so one of the sort of benchmarks I always use is when people ask me, “If your wife is out traveling, what would you tell her to look for if she was gonna go to a local coffee shop?” And I think having that basic list of these things that you need. So you know, it needs to be organic, it needs to be specialty grade. You won’t find in your coffee shop, however good they are, that it’s gonna be tested for heavy metals. That’s very rare that it’s tested for mold. But if you get a good quality, organic specialty grade coffee, you’re reducing your risk of having any of those sort of problems. You won’t have it tested for antioxidants, but it needs to be fresh because one of the things that we know, or we think is a cause of problems that people have with coffee is they’re drinking coffee that was roasted, 20… Well, 20 days isn’t bad. Sometimes it’s roasted a hundred days, 200 days before they drink the coffee. So people are drinking rancid oils, so the the cafestol and the kahweol, which are the oils, the lipids on the coffee, are rancid, and that alone can cause problems. So, freshness is very important as well.

Beth O’Hara, FN

So then once we get it home, we have to think about that as well. And you have some tips, in terms of brewing at home, to keep it from developing mycotoxins once we get there. Can you talk about those?

Andrew Salisbury

Yeah, it’s funny because we’ve done every step based on health and we can take it all the way to delivering that coffee bag to your house. And if in that final mile, there is mold in the machines that you use, I mean unfortunately, like K-cup machines are particularly notoriously bad because the water goes through a system and a system which can’t normally be cleaned. So the simpler the system is, the better it is likely to be for your health. So, we use a Chemex pour over, which is just basically a bamboo or a paper filter, and then you put the coffee in and it pours into a Chemex. Very old technology, it’s been around since the ’40s, but it’s very safe, and then you don’t have any mold build up. And also, the quality of the water’s important.

Beth O’Hara, FN

Yeah, I use a Chemex too. I love it. We’ll link to that and we’re gonna link to Purity Coffee, so people can check this out on our Summit Resources page. So it’s MastCell360.com/summit. You can find your links there and I’ll put the link for the Chemex pour over that I’m using. Super simple, and the filters, you just boil the water. It’s actually really pretty, I like having it sit on the counter and it’s a glass, just like a glass carafe, and then you put your filter, I use the stainless steel one, but you can’t get the paper ones as well. And then you put your coffee, your ground coffee beans in there, and you just slowly pour the water and it only takes a minute but I find it really meditative to do that.

Andrew Salisbury

Me too.

Beth O’Hara, FN

Pour that water in there and-

Andrew Salisbury

It’s a ritual.

Beth O’Hara, FN

It’s a ritual, yeah. And then the water, so many people I talk to, they’re drinking good quality filtered water. My preference is reverse osmosis water, and then they’re using tap water for their coffee. And boiling that water’s not gonna boil out mycotoxins. It’ll get out some chlorine, but it won’t get out all the pharmaceuticals and stuff.

Andrew Salisbury

It’s one of the problems. You often hear people in the coffee industry talking about, “Oh, mycotoxins and mold are not a problem because there’s a kill stage in the roasting where it’s roasted to such a degree that none of this mycotoxins and mold survive.” Unfortunately, they’re wrong. And also, the second problem is that if you were to provide or to roast the coffee at that sort of temperature, you would basically bake away all of the antioxidants in the coffee. So I mean, there’s a diminishing marginal returns. And without getting too technical, in the beginning, acrylamide is created in the coffee, which is possibly carcinogenic, so you don’t want acrylamide in your coffee. But in the later stage of coffee when it’s roasted, you have polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which are also very negative. But as you look at the roasting of the coffee, the curve goes down, so that you’re roasting away the antioxidants. So, part when we, I believe we’re the only coffee company in the world that does this, is we design a roasting curve specifically for the coffee, for the season of coffee that we’re using to maximize the antioxidants, very low levels of acrylamide, and no PAHs in the coffee. But you can’t possibly know that unless you test the coffee. I mean, unless you lab test the coffee through the roasting curve.

Beth O’Hara, FN

I didn’t even know you guys were doing that roasting curve analysis. I have read the studies on mycotoxins and heat and what’s degraded, and you almost have to burn it to to reduce the heat, I mean to reduce to mycotoxin.

Andrew Salisbury

And its unfortunate. Unfortunately, a lot of large coffee companies want to burn the coffee anyway because they want you to get used to that burnt taste because it homogenizes the taste of coffee. So if you’re in Singapore or Seattle, you can go into a big chain of coffee, coffee stores and the coffee will taste the same. And for an organic product, that’s rare. Well the only way to do that is to overroast the coffee. So, a burnt steak tan tastes like a burnt steak. It’s just, you know.

Beth O’Hara, FN

And that’s what, for people who aren’t familiar with those polycyclic aromatic compounds-

Andrew Salisbury

Hydrocarbons.

Beth O’Hara, FN

Hydro compounds that you’re talking about there, that’s the charring that you get if you burn a steak or you cook something, you char on the grill, and that does have carcinogenic properties, so we don’t want that in our coffee either, even though that’s part of that taste people are familiar with with coffee, it’s not how coffee should taste in my mind.

Andrew Salisbury

And it’s also unfortunate because sometimes the coffee can be a medium roast coffee, or even a light roast coffee, but if they use technology like a fluid bed roaster, or types of roasters that can create scorching of the coffee and tipping, it’s called tipping, but basically where it’s come in contact with the hot surface of the roaster, so in that particular part of the bean, it’s scorched and it’s black. The rest of the coffee may look like it’s a light roasted coffee. And so the issue is, you also have to think about the technology that you use to roast the coffee. So we only use Loring roasters, which are smokeless roasting technology that make sure the antioxidants are kept in the coffee.

Beth O’Hara, FN

And one other thing I wanna make sure people are thinking about is just if they’re using the beans and then grinding them, to clean out their grinder. Not to let that sit, ’cause that stuff will go rancid over time.

Andrew Salisbury

Yep. You can just see it in, if you go to your coffee machine, let’s say you forgot to clean it out before you went on a trip for a couple of days and you come back, it’s guaranteed that in the basket, you’re gonna see mold. I mean coffee, especially moist coffee, develops mold very, very quickly. It’s the mold you don’t see as well that is the real issue. So, it’s very important I think to be conscious of just how quickly mold develops in coffee, as it does throughout the whole process. I mean. I can tell you horror stories where when people are picking coffee and farms are picking coffee, they’ll take this mountain of green coffee and they’ll spray it with water so that it absorbs the maximum amount of water that they’re allowed for that weight of coffee. And the reason they would do that is, they spray that mountain of coffee and it absorbs 5% more water. They get 5% more for their total crop. So in other words, it drops.

Beth O’Hara, FN

It’s price per kilogram.

Andrew Salisbury

That’s right, and it drops to the bottom line. And so, but then of course you’re putting it in bags and you’re shipping it for months, in some cases, so water and moist coffee is just not a recipe that you really want to have when you wanna avoid mold.

Beth O’Hara, FN

So I wanna share some tips also for really sensitive people, which, we specialize in people who are quite sensitive and I have often, if people aren’t sure and they’re gonna start coffee, I actually have them get your Purity Pockets, which I also love. So I’ll do the whole grinding and the Chemex pour over ritual on the weekends, but my weeks are pretty busy and I like to spend my morning meditating. So what I use is the Purity Pockets, which look like teabags. And I love those because you can really control your brewing process and I’ll have them use those and do… So I’m just sharing this for people who aren’t sure if they wanna try it, they’re not sure where to start. They could get those Purity Pockets. and then do a 30-second brew. You could even do a little dunk, if you’re super sensitive. You just kind of dunk it a couple times and start there.

Andrew Salisbury

Yep, just see how your body reacts and as you said, it’s single serve, and so effectively you’re creating a bit of a pour over with those teabags. Those tea bags or the Pocket Purity is a perfect example of how we were able to steal from different parts of the industry. And in this case, this was the very low end of the industry. So Maxwell House and Folgers have for many years, over 30 years they’ve been selling this sort of, their coffee in the tea bag, but it’s very poor quality coffee is the issue. But we realized, for our customers, a lot of our customers were saying, “Look, you’re the only coffee we can drink now. We need to figure out a way that we can get your coffee when we’re on the road.” And so it dealt with the need to give them good quality coffee when they were traveling.

Beth O’Hara, FN

And I take it with me every time I travel. I’ve got several packets there because I don’t wanna get my coffee anywhere else. I’m not gonna go to Starbucks or something like that. It still makes me feel bad.

Andrew Salisbury

Yeah. Yeah.

Beth O’Hara, FN

So a couple other tips for people is, if you do that super gentle introduction and it’s still a little too much, and this is for our like absolute super sensitive people. Most people are gonna be just great. They’re gonna do great. But if you’re super, super sensitive and you wanna get into it, if that couple dunks and still feels a little stimulating, what it is, is that the coffee supports the liver detoxification pathways, so you may have to get some binders on board first and just know that, and then come back to it. But 95% of people listening to this probably can just start with the Purity Pocket and they’re gonna do great, as long as they don’t over brew it. And so, let’s start to shift in. Oh, I had one other tip I wanted to give people, which, I always get this question is, coffee enemas. And that’s outside of the scope of our conversation, but I know people are gonna ask and I just wanna let them know, whatever you use for your coffee enema, make sure that it is mycotoxin free. You don’t wanna be putting more mycotoxins in your body and you get absorption through the rectum and it needs to be organic. Whatever you put in there, you’re gonna absorb into your bloodstream. And then there is the hepatic vein that goes to the liver and that’s how those coffee enemas will, they’re gonna push detoxification. But you guys actually did some studies comparing various coffees used in these big healing centers for coffee enemas. Can you share what you found there?

Andrew Salisbury

Yeah, and one of the first things that we did, within the first maybe 18 months of the business before we even sold a bag of coffee is we tested our coffee against 49 of the top brands in the US, represents about 80% of the market. We also tested coffees that we used for enemas, because we knew that some people who were health conscious were gonna focus on that with us. I won’t, without naming names, I will say that the issue is that they’re not going through the same level of oversight to the quality of the coffee. So there’s two things at play. First, because people aren’t drinking the coffee, they don’t worry about taste. But unfortunately, because they don’t worry about taste, they’re also not worrying about quality. So you’re not getting the highest quality of coffee, which obviously means that you’re minimizing the good stuff like the antioxidants, the chlorogenic acids, chlorogenic lactones, trigonelline, all the things you want to get in your coffee. But they’re also not testing for the negative compounds in coffee, and as a minimum, we talked about this earlier, a mold mycotoxin test is one of the cheapest things that we do. It’s just the easiest, lowest bar that you could have. Really every coffee company should be testing to be free of mold and mycotoxins. It’s a hundred dollar test. So if your wellness clinic is offering coffee enemas, but they’re not, that coffee isn’t certified to be free of mold or mycotoxin, it’s very suspicious because it’s a very cheap test for you to order.

Beth O’Hara, FN

So I just like to tell people, if you’re going to use a different coffee, just ask them for the certificate of analysis and check that they’ve been testing for pesticides, mycotoxins, and heavy metals and that they passed. And not just, I think some of the times, those standards aren’t strict enough either. So they shouldn’t be in there. I mean, it shouldn’t even be like an acceptable level, it should be zero.

Andrew Salisbury

And unfortunately there’s a different level in terms of what’s acceptable based on the country you’re in. So if you are in Europe, or if you’re in Asia, or Japan in particular, the standards are much better in terms of like, they’re not gonna accept coffee that is tested to have even parts per billion of ochratoxin A. It’s just the higher standards. And so what happens is, if coffee is of a lower standard, it often gets sent to the US because they know that it’s gonna pass the test on import.

Beth O’Hara, FN

So that’s a good point too, is to look at where the, one, the certificate of analysis should be through a third-party company. They should not be doing their own testing, and find out what the standards were for that. I have done some coffee enemas. This is the only coffee I’ll use for mine because I just can trust it and it’s very clean. Now if you’re super sensitive, don’t jump into coffee enemas, get your binders on board and if you’re interested, I’ve got some more details on that in our MC360 Precision Mold Master Class for Sensitive People. Let’s get into some options ’cause people are gonna wanna know at this point, well if they’re wanna go with Purity Coffee, what are there different options? Let’s talk about super sensitive people who are caffeine sensitive, and then the coffee connoisseurs who are really in for the flavor and they want the caffeine. That way we can kinda hit all the levels of our community here.

Andrew Salisbury

Yeah, and so early on, since we make every decision based on health, we didn’t want to highlight flavor profiles. And as you mentioned, it’s a great tasting coffee because it’s organic, regeneratively farmed, that sort of thing. But we’re focusing on what we see as the potential health benefits of the different coffees. So the decaf, which is called Calm, is Swiss water processed decaf, which takes out 99.8%, I think, of the caffeine. But that’s really the only method that you should consider if you… I mean, I was gonna say you should consider if you have health concerns, but to be honest, Swiss water is the only method you should consider in terms of decaffeination because the other two methods, the ethyl acetate, and I forget the other one now. I forget the name of the other one, but they’re both chemical processes, which leaches chemicals into the coffee and it’s just, it’s criminals go every step of the process for health and then that final mile just fall short. So the decaffeination, Calm, Swiss water processed, that’s very important. And then with our Flow coffee, it’s a medium roast, very high in antioxidants, sourced for antioxidants. And then Protect was derived, or we worked closely with Dr. Sanjiv Chopra, who’s the last dean of admission of Harvard Med School, and he’s a liver surgeon, liver hepatologist. And he’s helped us create awareness around coffee and liver health, and so we maximize certain compounds that we know to be healthy for the liver. And then finally, I suppose Ease is the one, if you’re more sensitive to coffee, a darker roast coffee, even though it roasts away some of the antioxidants, so it’s a lower level of antioxidants than, let’s say, our Flow coffee, it’s better for the stomach because out of chlorogenic acids comes chlorogenic lactones and chlorogenic lactones are friendly on the stomach and easier for most people who’ve got some sensitivities to consume.

Beth O’Hara, FN

And I just wanna share, for our super sensitive people, just go straight to those decaf Purity Pockets and we’re gonna have a special offer for you through the summit over at the Summit Resources page as well. So again, it’s ,MastCell360.com/summit and you can get your discount code there. There’s gonna be a special offer through the summit, so make sure you pop over there and grab that. And Andrew wanted to give people an real easy introduction to trying the coffee, which we appreciate. To wrap us up here, you all have bought your own coffee farm now. Tell us about that and tell us about why. Why at this point?

Andrew Salisbury

It was another deep breath for the company. So we decided to just, when we started this company, make every decision based on health without compromise. And one of the things we started to notice is, we’ve tested literally hundreds of coffees around the world. We tested those coffees to be clean and make sure that they’re free of all the negative elements, but also high in antioxidants. We started to recognize a trend. So we were driven by the lab results, but we started to recognize that coffee that was high in antioxidants was grown in its natural environments. So that meant that it was regenerative, organic agriculture. So it didn’t look like an industry, it wasn’t rows and rows of coffee trees with tractors that go in between those trees to pick the coffee. It was very sort of, on a hill. There’s mango trees, banana trees, papaya trees. There’s a lot of cover crop. There’s a lot of foliage on the ground. And so we started recognizing, okay, if this is present in every single case, we started shopping for our coffee looking for certain monikers or labels. So one of the labels, for example, we looked for was Smithsonian Bird Friendly, and while we care about the environment, the reason why we picked Smithsonian Bird Friendly is because that was an indication that the coffee was grown in its natural environment, because, basically, migratory birds would stop and build their nests on the coffee trees and that sort of thing. 

So, there were certain indicators that told us that we were in the right place. What we’ve realized, and this is a long answer to a short question, but what we’ve realized is that, the next stage for Purity Coffee is we have to start controlling what we do with quality on the soil level. There’s a compromise where, unfortunately, because of pesticides and herbicides, so often great soil is being converted to dirt and that means there’s no microbial activity. It’s not health. Excuse me, it’s not healthy for the plant that it’s feeding. So we care about concentrating on the soil. So what we’re doing now is, we bought our own farm in Columbia, about a hundred acre farm and we’re using it to divide the plot into different areas, looking at different cultivars for coffee and health, looking at soil conditions, all organic additives. We’re even looking at bees and just the impact of bees on the chlorogenic acids in the coffee. So we are the only coffee company in the world that is focused on health that owns its own farm and is experimenting on a farm level, because that’s gonna be the next level. The coffee you were drinking a hundred years ago is not the same quality, it’s better quality than the coffee that we drink today. We want to return to the same standards of agriculture that gave us the coffee that was just very good for you.

Beth O’Hara, FN

And that’s another reason that I so appreciate your company, because one of the things that I’ve been talking about a lot is how those of us with mast cell activation that have gotten so sick and so sensitive, it’s not that we are these strange unicorns out here and this is only happening to us, what’s happening in the world with this intense level of pesticide use, all of these chemicals, all of this stuff that’s not sustainable, this destruction of the soil, the air pollution, and so on, is happening to all of us. It’s just some of us are the canaries in the coal mine getting sick right away and waving the flag saying, “Danger, we can’t continue,” and then the other people, they’re still getting sick, it’s just gonna show up 30 years down the road with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, stage four cancers and so on. But we’re all horribly affected.

Andrew Salisbury

Absolutely.

Beth O’Hara, FN

And the way that we can… Well one, I feel like being sick the way that those of us in this community have been sick, as we recover our health, there’s a call to action for us to be leaders in this change. And one of the ways we can be leaders is choosing carefully who we purchase from, and are they caring for the environment? Are they caring for this world we live in, this earth that is the only home we have? And even if we set up a colony on Mars, we’re not gonna be healthy because we’re creatures of the earth. And also companies like yours, just changing the industry, changing how we do things is how we’re gonna turn this around because mast activation has been just rising, rising, and it only got a diagnosis code in 2016. And the numbers are just, we’re up to 17% of the general population and then we came out of this pandemic. We didn’t even have a population study looking at where we are today, and just the last 30 years, the huge rise in chronic illnesses. So I wanna thank you for what you are doing environmentally, I wanna thank you for the really driving this movement, in terms of health benefits of coffee in this bigger picture way, not just for the individual, but for the whole planet. And I’m hoping this puts pressure on the other coffee companies to follow suit.

Andrew Salisbury

And I think, you made a very good point, but it’s, I think what we need to do is start creating standards for other people to follow in the coffee industry when we want people to focus on the health benefits of coffee. So what we hope to do on a farm level is start creating standards that other people could follow. It can be separate companies, but other people recognize that as we as consumers are willing to pay a little bit more for coffee that’s of a high quality, is processed in the right way, then we are gonna have more money to give to farmers to get them to move to those standards, because one of the problems is that industrial farming is more profitable. It’s higher yields and if you’re given a New York spot price for coffee, you can make more money that way. So unless we sort of close that gap where we basically explain to people that if they’re willing to pay a little bit more for really good quality products for health, then we can pay the farmers more and we can encourage more of this behavior. And that’s the next step. And there’s even a whole environmental perspective to this, in terms of planting coffee trees and getting people to… Coffee trees sequester carbon from the atmosphere. Industrial farming, because it’s till farming, basically is releasing carbon into the atmosphere. So it’s a virtual circle. I mean, if we can provide coffee that’s great for an individual’s health, we can pay more to the farmers to plant more trees and have more quality product, which is also good for the environment. So there’s a happy circle that could go on here if we could get people to create a movement that coffee is important for their health.

Beth O’Hara, FN

So I hope that, as a community, you’ll join me in supporting Purity Coffee in this mission if it calls to you. If you’re really tied to another coffee brand, please put pressure on them to do this, and all the companies that you’re working with. And this is one of the ways that I make choices, and one of the ways that I help drive this mission forward is making choices with who I support, who I buy from, and how they’re taking care of the planet. Thank you for this wonderful interview.

Andrew Salisbury

My pleasure.

Beth O’Hara, FN

Thank you for all that you do for people’s health. And thank you once again for your tremendous support of our summit. We couldn’t have gotten it out there without you.

Andrew Salisbury

Oh, I appreciate the platform and really appreciate having the time to talk about this.