The Truth About Mycotoxins In Coffee

Andrew Salisbury

Yeah, it really hasn’t been my background at all. I’ve been most of my life in telecommunications, in software, and in software in Latin America. And I’ll give you a sort of shorter version of the story, but the history is I sold the business in 2011. I was very used to the software industry, took some time off with my wife and it was really looking for the next opportunity, but it was gonna be another opportunity in the exact same field. But then my wife started having some health issues. So Amber was low energy, difficult to get out of bed in the morning, really was just one of these things that was just, it was affecting her lifestyle and her ability to parent. And it was just very stressful for all of us. So we went to doctors and the normal stuff. And along the whole journey of doing that, my wife was drinking a lot of coffee and I think I was probably trying to be a little domineering and tell her that she should give up on her coffee. And she was very resistant, so she was… My attitude, it was one step on accelerator. One step on the break that her focus was, if she was drinking coffee, she’s giving herself energy she didn’t have. And so I started getting educated about coffee, probably to win the arguments and met two professors at the Institute of Coffee Studies in Vanderbilt university in Tennessee. And they educated me that there’s just a huge gap between what the scientific community knows about the health benefits of coffee and the consumers and is incredibly good for you. So it just got me down this road of really research and learning about the health benefits of coffee. And then again, then I met one of the top professors in the world, Dr. Adriana Farah in university of Rio. And she basically worked with me for about 18 months on a consulting project, looking at every step of the chain with only one question in mind, if we were to make every decision based on health, what would it look like? And so that’s… And I really didn’t know there was gonna be a business at the end of that research, but after two years, we found a coffee and we made every decision based on health and we started presenting it to friends and it was received really well. And that’s how we started.

Nafysa Parpia, ND

Did your wife’s health go back to normal after she started drinking your coffee?

Andrew Salisbury

Her health went back to normal and it took a long while. And I would never say that our coffee was the panacea. That was the-

Nafysa Parpia, ND

I was wondering.

Andrew Salisbury

Everything. I think that there was a series of things we did. We did mould remediation and we changed her diet and we looked at different foods and we cut down on the bad things in our diets. There’s a lot of things that we did, and those all had a profound effect. But what I say to Amber now is, “The knowledge that I have it just about the importance of selecting the right coffee was probably one of the easiest things we could have done had we have known.” So I don’t know to the level it contributed to health problems. It was probably a series of things, but it’s your choice in coffee is a very easy selection to improve overall health and longevity.

Nafysa Parpia, ND

Definitely.

Andrew Salisbury

Yeah.

Eric  Gordon, MD

What’s exciting to me is especially for this audience, is how careful you are making sure that the coffee isn’t mouldy, ’cause I’ve always felt that, again, healthy people, the mycotoxin flowed from coffee maybe not great for you, but I don’t think is… Well, I don’t know, but probably isn’t that significant, but as you get more sensitive, it’s gonna be a bigger, bigger deal. And so how do you go about lowering the mycotoxin load?

Andrew Salisbury

Well, so our history is we decided when I worked with professor Adriana Farah, we said every decision based on health, we’re not gonna compromise. So there was some really obvious, easy decisions. Like, should it be organic or spray with pesticides? Should it be mouldy or should it be free of mine? So these were decisions, conversations that happened over 30 seconds, we’d go, “Okay, we’ll have non-mouldy food,” obviously.

Nafysa Parpia, ND

Great. You’re right.

Andrew Salisbury

But then the next steps after that are a little bit more complicated. The problem with coffee is that mould develops at various stages in the production if companies cut corners. And following all of the rules, costs a little bit more money and it doesn’t happen as often as we would like it to happen in coffee. So one of the issues with coffee is when you pick coffee, for example, there’s a lot of industrial farming for picking coffee. So they have these big tractors that go down the rows of coffee trees, and they shake the trees and they shake ripe cherries, underripe cherries, and overripe cherries, all at the same time, twigs leaves. And they put them in this collecting system and then it’s processed later. But the problem is some of these cherries are mouldy, because they ripe on a different levels. So when you put, let’s say imagine putting a mouldy strawberries in a vats of fresh strawberries, you come back the next day, the whole vat is mouldy. So while we’re not super concerned, we are concerned about the mould. What we’re more concerned about is the derivatives of mycotoxin that come from the mould, like ochratoxin A, so that’s a really big issue in the coffee industry. As far as I’m concerned is ochratoxin A, because it doesn’t roast away. A lot of people say, I’ll take my coffee. And even if it was, did have some mould on it, if I roast it, it’s gonna roast away. That’s not true, it is true for the mould. It’s not true of the mycotoxin from .

Eric  Gordon, MD

Yeah. And it’s interesting that ochratoxin A, when we do urine mycotoxin testing on people, it’s probably the most common one to show up often sometimes not in high enough numbers to say, “Oh my God,” but I wasn’t aware that yet coffee is probably worth it’s coming from.

Andrew Salisbury

Yeah. And it’s… And another part of the problem is it’s not the same level of standards in the US. So in Europe or in Asia, the standards, which are a past per billion of anywhere from five to 10 past per billion is an acceptable standard, no than greater than that. But in the US, you don’t have standards. So it often means that it’s the source of coffee that maybe wouldn’t have fit the criteria of Europe and Asia or so. Yeah, it can be an issue.

Eric  Gordon, MD

Yeah. No, that is a problem. We, we have standards for animals, because we-

Andrew Salisbury

Yeah.

Eric  Gordon, MD

It comes to mycotoxins but not the meatball in the state.

Andrew Salisbury

Yeah.

Nafysa Parpia, ND

Yeah, so tell us about what makes your coffee different than most other coffees.

Andrew Salisbury

Well, I think it’s ’cause we asked a different question and our question was when I started learning about the health benefits of coffee, I mean just in areas like liver disease prevention of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, I’m sure you’ve seen all of these studies around coffee and health. I was looking initially and saying, “Okay, well this is great. My wife’s got probably drinking poor quality coffee. What’s the very best coffee that I can buy?” And Adriana couldn’t point me to one. She could only point me to a shopping list of things that I should look for when asking for the coffee. And then as we worked later, the shopping list got more and more complex. So she would say things. So the basic things on the shopping list and coffee needs to be organic. It’s the most heavily treated crop in the planet, the sort of pesticides that are used on coffee and the quantity of cat pesticides and the softened glyphosate. You literally have to have your coffee is organic, then another low bar as it needs to be tested for mold or mycotoxins. But again, that’s a low bar. We should ask every one of coffee producers to guarantee that it’s a 50, $75 test. And it’s just… We should not be drinking mycotoxins in our food. But what we really focus on is the antioxidants and coffee. So the health benefits that come from coffee, don’t come from the absence of bad stuff. Now you don’t want mould and you don’t want pesticides and you want your coffee to be fresh, but you also want more chlorogenic acids, which are the antioxidants in coffee. So what we do is we focus on the CGAs in the coffee, the polyphenols and the chlorogenic acids in coffee. And that’s where it gets a little bit complicated. The amount of chlorogenic acids, the antioxidants in coffee vary from crop to crop, harvest to harvest, region to region. So the only way for you to find the highest level of antioxidants is you have to lab test coffee from around the world and then you pick the ones that are highest and then we roast it to maintain the antioxidants. So when you roast coffee, you can create negative compounds and create positive compounds or maintain positive compounds in the roast. And we focus on developing a roast curve for that specific coffee to maintain the antioxidants that were available in the green bean.

Eric  Gordon, MD

That is a lot of work.

Nafysa Parpia, ND

Yeah.

Andrew Salisbury

Yeah. It’s, yeah. Truthfully, it was one of the issues at the beginning. And we honestly felt like, even though we weren’t gonna compromise and we were making every decision based on health, we felt like we might have over-engineered this in the sense that we go far beyond what our customers are asking for. I mean, they ask for mould free, mycotoxin free, organic coffee and we’re focusing really on the antioxidants, but we know that’s where the truth is gonna lead, which is there’s people recognize that coffee is good for health. They’re gonna start saying why? It’s not the caffeine, you don’t get this from drinking an energy drink, you get this from the antioxidants. And so that’s why we focused in that area.

Eric  Gordon, MD

Right. And you make a decaf, I believe?

Andrew Salisbury

We do, yeah. It’s suits in water. There’s four ways to decaf coffee. And two of them uses poisons, which are really, you just don’t wanna anyone near your food. The other two, which is Swiss Water and critical CO2, but the only ways that are really natural and they retain the antioxidants in the decaffeination process. So I know I’m a little biased, but I think we have the best decaf in the US. They’re little bias, but I say that because what we do is different. We have the highest quality coffee that we can get, which is organic regeneratively farmed hand-picked, hand-selected, bird friendly. And there’s all the reason why these monikers make a difference for health, but a lot of people, when they decaf the coffee, then it leaches all of the the antioxidants out of the coffee. So obviously that doesn’t work. So we have to have a method that maintains the antioxidants.

Nafysa Parpia, ND

It sounds like this is actually really good for the planet too. Not just harmful, but probably beneficial.

Andrew Salisbury

It’s a big part of where we’re going now as a company.

Nafysa Parpia, ND

Yeah.

Andrew Salisbury

So we didn’t know this starting out. So our decision was, every decision based on health, wherever it was gonna lead us. And so pretty early on, we discovered it’s about antioxidants. And then we would buy coffee that has the highest level of antioxidants. But about two years ago, we started to recognize a pattern, which is that, the coffee that was highest in antioxidants was regeneratively farmed. So it was organically refarmed. So it was grown in its natural conditions. So we would start looking for labels that would show that the coffee is grown in its natural conditions. So we’d say, well, it needs to be hand-picked and hand-selected, because if it’s grown in its natural conditions, that’s the only way you can pick the coffee. You’re gonna climb up a hill. You’re gonna hand-pick and hand-select them, a tractor couldn’t possibly go down those rows of coffee trees. So we look for a hand-picked, hand-selected Smithsonian Bird Friendly, ’cause that would indicate that migratory birds could rest on the trees. They wouldn’t do that in a farm environment.

Nafysa Parpia, ND

Right.

Andrew Salisbury

But what we started to recognize is that the soil quality obviously feeds the nutrients in the plant and the nutrients in the coffee. Avoid the bad stuff, get really good quality soil for the coffee. So what we’ve started to do now is we’ve just bought a farm in Columbia, in a place called Puerto Rico and we’re working on organic regenerative farming for coffee so we can create very high standards. And the reason that it matters is that if you till farm, your industrially farms, you churn up the soil, you till the farm, and you release carbon into the atmosphere, organic regenerative farming captures carbon from the atmosphere. So not only is it good for you, entire antioxidants and it’s more nutrient dense, but it’s better for the- actually is a better farming method that reduces the carbon footprints. It actually eradicates the carbon footprint of coffee.

Nafysa Parpia, ND

I love it.

Eric  Gordon, MD

Yeah.

Nafysa Parpia, ND

Yeah.

Eric  Gordon, MD

This is just, it’s such a good example of people are coining the term now of salugenesis or like returning to health.

Andrew Salisbury

Yeah.

Eric  Gordon, MD

And how that has to happen on multiple levels. As physicians in the world, we always focused on disease and pathology.

Andrew Salisbury

Yeah.

Eric  Gordon, MD

And this is helping focus on that returning to, just like the soil and the plants, they’re gonna give you better, healthier fruits because they’re healthier. And just obvious to people, if we are ingesting healthier foods and drinks, we’re gonna be healthier. And the work that you’ve been exploring with the antioxidant and benefits and how it affects. And so tell… Just I’d love to go down a little rabbit hole. You talked about you had some interesting conversations with experts in liver disease.

Andrew Salisbury

Yeah.

Eric  Gordon, MD

And this because that’s a big for our patients.

Andrew Salisbury

Yeah. Very early on, we were lucky enough to be introduced to Dr. Sanjiv Chopra. Who’s the last Dean of Admission at Harvard Med School. And he’s a liver surgeon. And for about 35 years, he’s written a couple of books and he’s written one recently on coffee and another one called “The Big 5”. And the reason I reached out to him initially is that, in the “The Big 5”, it’s the five big things that you can do for you to improve your overall health and longevity. Those things like meditation, walking, vitamin D, that sort of thing. But coffee was chapter number one. And in his first chapter, he talks about, he said, “Look as a liver surgeon, 35 years, I haven’t seen any one thing that you can drink that will have a better impact or eat that will have a better impact on your liver.” There’s none of the things that people talk about are as positive to the liver as coffee. So there’s been some very large studies, umbrella studies with over 200 different studies looking at the liver specifically. And it shows that from every cap from the baseline, you have a 20% lower chance of ever developing non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, liver cirrhosis, or end stage liver disease. So in other words, you drink two caps of coffee a day, you have a 40% lower chance of ever developing liver disease. You drink eight cups or four cups, you have an 80% chance. I mean, it’s dose dependence.

Nafysa Parpia, ND

And then most coffee is full of pesticides and mycotoxins.

Andrew Salisbury

Yeah.

Nafysa Parpia, ND

And that negates the coffee we have is-

Andrew Salisbury

This conversation, it’s such an interesting for me. I had this conversation all the time, there’s the bad stuff, and it’s the good stuff. And clearly all of these studies have been done on coffee over the last say, 40 years. So some people were drinking awful quality coffee, and some people were drinking great coffee and the health benefits come despite that. So what I think is interesting is what happens if you make every decision based on health, do they get better? I mean, we’ll have to do some serious testing over the years, but clearly having more antioxidants in the coffee.

Eric  Gordon, MD

Wait and just that, good coffee, bad coffee, but coffee seems to be important.

Andrew Salisbury

Yeah. So we don’t really know what happens when you put this together. We’ve got a lot of pesticide residues on coffee. We’ve got quality and quantity of pesticides that shouldn’t be used. We’ve got mycotoxins, which are very aggressive. And then we’ve got on the other hand, the very positive things like chlorogenic acids and the polyphenols. So what we are attempting to do is reduce the bad stuff, make sure there’s none of the bad stuff, more of the good stuff. Only time will tell whether it has a direct effect on your health. But we can only say anecdotally, in four years now, we’ve got nearly 17,000 5 star testimonials from very passionate customers. And not saying this is the sales pitches, but it’s really just to look at the feedback on a weekly basis of people who couldn’t drink coffee and now can drink it. It’s really encouraging that we’re in the right place.

Nafysa Parpia, ND

But when you say these people couldn’t drink coffee and now they can, what is the difference? Were they revved up? Were they a bit sick? What changed?

Andrew Salisbury

Well, a lot of them is, we have a big phone with mass cell activation syndrome with a lot of people who are very sensitive there, histamine analogies, mould toxicity, some people just said, “I was 40, I woke up one day and I just couldn’t start stomach my coffee. And then I had to drink less and less.” And it could be things just as strange as itching, and skin conditions, stomach upsets, nervousness. A lot of the side effects that people think come from coffee, come from bad coffee. It’s not the coffee. It really isn’t. It’s like you being nervous, you being nervous energy, upset stomach, cold sweats that people recognize when they go, “Oh, I had one too many cups of coffee just with one too much coffee.” That really is a result of bad coffee. Now we can’t tell you whether you’ve got a sensitivity to ochratoxin A or pesticide residue or stale coffee. That’s another issue. Freshness of coffee is very important. We’re drinking stale coffee as a nation. But anyway, so what I’m saying is it’s just, we’ll never know exactly what the cause is, but when we know we will remove the bad stuff and focus on just improving the good stuff, that is much better tolerated.

Eric  Gordon, MD

Yeah. Well, once again, you’re showing that it’s the canaries. ‘Cause basically, and it’s the people mass cell activation, histamine sensitivity, moulds sense, mycotoxin sensitivity. These are all sensitivities of people whose systems are inflamed from some, usually another source.

Andrew Salisbury

Yeah.

Eric  Gordon, MD

And finally the system starts to break down a bit, and you become more sensitive to whatever is in the environment that can inflame you.

Nafysa Parpia, ND

And these are our patients.

Eric  Gordon, MD

Yeah.

Andrew Salisbury

Yeah. ‘Cause I said the same thing to Amber and she uses the analogy of a glass of water that, you can pour in water to a glass when it’s half full, but when it’s completely full and it’s tipping over, you just need a little drop of something. And then you are spilling the water, same thing with her sensitivities to certain things. She’s built up a resistance now, but coffee is something we drink every single day. So if you are drinking something that isn’t as good for you as it can be, and you’re drinking it three to four cups a day, it can have a real profounding impact on your diet, so-

Nafysa Parpia, ND

Yeah. Well thank you so much.

Eric  Gordon, MD

Yes-

Andrew Salisbury

Pleasure.

Eric  Gordon, MD

And very interesting. And what I look forward to learning more about the intricacies of, not cause it’s, you know what I… The more I think about it, is that the studies over the years on coffee, as I remember 20 years ago there was increasing every disease. And then as we started to look closer, we started to realize that no, it was actually improving everything from pancreatic cancer to liver disease. And it’s just something that I’d love to explore with you more since it looks like you’ve done the work.

Andrew Salisbury

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I’m a geek, when it comes to coffee.

Eric  Gordon, MD

Yeah.

Nafysa Parpia, ND

That’s great.

Eric  Gordon, MD

That’s very exciting, so-

Nafysa Parpia, ND

That’s wonderful.

Andrew Salisbury

Yeah. Pleasure.

Eric  Gordon, MD

Thank you very much.

Nafysa Parpia, ND

Thank you.

Andrew Salisbury

Thank you. That was great.