The Truth About Mycotoxins In Coffee

Introduction and Coffee Background 0:00

Welcome to this episode of the Mycotoxins in Chronic Illness Summit. I'm very excited to have with us today, Andrew Salisbury, the founder of Purity Coffee. Welcome, Andrew. It's so good to have you here with us today. Likewise. Thank you very much. Yeah. Yeah, it really is exciting. And what I'd love to hear our audience to hear is something we were chatting about just before we went live is what got you into this field. Because it's, it it's not the most original field for someone just entered coffee production.

Yeah. It really hasn't been my background at all. I mean, I've been, most of my life in telecommunications, in software and in software in Latin America. And now I'll give you a sort of shorter version of the story, but, the, the history is I sold the business in 2011. I was 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 going to be another opportunity in the exact same sort of field. And then my wife started having some health issues.

So Amber was, you know, low energy, difficult to get out of bed in the morning. Just, you know, really was just one of these things that was just it was affecting, her lifestyle and her ability to to parents. And it was just very stressful for all of us. So we went to doctors and, and the normal sort of 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, to, to, be a little domineering and tell her that she should give up on her coffee.

And she was very resistant. You know, so she was, you know, my attitude is it was one step on the accelerator, one step on the brakes, and that her focus was, you know, if she was drinking coffee, she's giving us off energy she didn't have. And so I started getting educated about coffee, probably to to win the argument.

Health-Driven Coffee Research and Mycotoxins 1:57

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 it's incredibly good for you. So it just sort of got me down this road of really research and learning about the health benefits of coffee. And again, then I met one of the top professors in the world, a doctor AG and for in university of 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? So that's sort of and I really didn't know there was going to be a business at the end of that sort of research. But but after two years, we we found the coffee. We made every decision based on health. And and we started presented it to friends and, and it was received really well. And, you know, that's how we started. Did your wife's health go back to normal after she started drinking your coffee? Her health went back to normal, and it took a long while, and I not, I would never say that our coffee was sort of the panacea, that it was the wonderful thing.

I think that there was a series of things we did, and we did more remediation, and we changed the diets. We looked at different foods and, and, 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. Well, I say one, but now is the knowledge that I have it just about the 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 if I don't know to the level it contributed to to a health problems.

It was probably a series of things, but I mean, it was it's your choice. And coffees, a very easy selection to improve overall health in Germany. Definitely. Yeah. What's exciting to me is especially for this audience is the eye is how careful you are making sure that the coffee isn't moldy because, you know, I've always felt that, you know, again, healthy people, the mycotoxins flowed from coffee. Maybe not great for you, but I don't think is, although, I don't know, but probably isn't that significant.

But as you get more sensitive, it's going to be a bigger, bigger deal. And so how do you how do you go about lowering the mycotoxins load? Well, so the I history, as we decided when I worked with Professor Andrea Farrar, we said every decision based on health, we're not going to compromise. So there was some really obvious easy decisions like should it be organic or sprayed with pesticides, should it be moldy or should it be free of water? So these were decisions, conversations that that happened over 30s we go, okay, we'll have non moldy food, you know right.

Okay. The next steps after that are a little bit more complicated. The problem with coffee is that that mold develops at various stages in the production. If companies can't corners and, you know, and, and following all of the rules cost a little bit more money in and, and it doesn't happen as often as we would like it to happen in coffee. So one of the issues with with coffee is when you pick coffee, for example, there's a lot of industrial farming for baking 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, underwrite 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 moldy because they ripen to different levels. So when you put, let's say, I imagine putting a moldy strawberry in advance of fresh strawberries, you come back the next day. The whole van is moldy. So while we're not super concerned, we are concerned about the mold. What we're more concerned about is the the derivatives, the mycotoxins that come from the mold, like oak or toxin I.

So that's a really big issue. In the coffee industry, as far as I'm concerned, is oak toxin because it doesn't roast away. You know, a lot of people say, you know, I'll take my coffee. And even if it was did have some mold on it, if I roast it, it's going to roast away. That's not true. It is true of the mold. It's not true of the, the Microsoft pellets from or you. Yeah. And it's interesting that, oak toxin A when we do urine mycotoxins testing on people, it's probably the most common one to show up often in sometimes not in high enough numbers to say, oh my God.

But, it's I wasn't aware that. Yeah, coffee is probably where it's coming from. Yeah.

Antioxidants, Decaf, and Regenerative Farming 6:39

And it's, and the, another part of the problem is there's not the same level of standards, in the US. So in Europe or in Asia, the standards which are, parts per billion of, of anywhere from 5 to 10 parts per billion is an acceptable standard, no greater than, greater than that. But in the US you don't have standards. So it often means that is the source of, of coffee that maybe wouldn't have fit the criteria of Europe and, and Asia. So, you know, you know, it can be an issue. Yeah. Now, there is a problem.

We we have standards for animals because we. Yeah, it comes with mycotoxins, but not for people in the state. Yeah. Yeah. So tell us about, what makes your coffee different than most other coffees. Well, I think it's because 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 or prevention of type two diabetes, heart disease. I'm sure you've seen all of these studies around coffee and health. I was looking at, initially and saying, okay, well, this is great.

My wife's got, you know, probably drinking poor quality coffee. What's the very best coffee? The 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 work later in the shopping, this got more and more complex. So, you know, so she would say things. So the basic things on the shopping list, and these, you know, coffee needs to be organic is the most heavily treated crop in the planet, the sort of pesticides that are used in coffee and the quantity of cat pesticides.

And to soften glyphosate. I mean, you just you literally have to have your coffee is organic. Then another low bar is it needs to be tested for, for mold and mycotoxins. But again, that's a low bar. We should really we should ask everyone of, coffee producers to to guarantee that it's a $5,075 test. And it's just, you know, we should not be drinking mycotoxins in our food, but what we really focus on is the antioxidants in coffee. So the health benefits that come from coffee don't come from the absence of bad stuff.

Now, you don't want mold 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, 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 green Bay. That is a lot of work. Yeah, yeah, it's yeah, it was one of them. But truthfully, it was one of the one of the issues at the beginning, we we honestly felt like even though we weren't going to compromise and we were making every decision based on health, we felt like we might have overengineered this in the sense that we'd go far beyond what our customers are asking for.

I mean, they ask for, you know, mold free mycotoxins and free organic coffee. And we're focusing really on the antioxidants. But we know that's where the truth is going to lead, which is those people recognize that coffee is good for health. They're going to start saying why it's not the caffeine. It's not. You don't get this from drinking an energy drink. You get this from the antioxidants. And so that's that. That's why we focus on that area. Right. And while in it there's, there's the does you make a decaf I believe we do.

Yeah. Swiftwater there's there's four ways the decaf coffee and two of them using uses poisons which you really you just don't want to anywhere near your food. The other two which is Swiss water and critical CO2. But the only ways that are really sort of natural and they retain the antioxidants in the decaffeinated process. So I mean, I know I'm a little biased, but I think we have the best decaf in the US. I mean, I'm a little biased, but but but I say that because what we do is different. We we have the highest quality coffee that we can.

We can get it's organic, regenerative, reformed, hand-picked, hand-selected, bird friendly. I mean, and there's all the all the reasons why these monikers make a difference for health. But but, a lot of people, when they decaf the coffee, then it leaches all, 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. Sounds like this is actually really good for the planet to not just not just, harmful, but probably beneficial.

It's a big part of where we're going now as a company. So we didn't know this starting out. So our decision was every decision based on health, wherever it was going to 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 regenerative the farm. So it was organic, regenerated, reformed.

So it was grown in its natural conditions. So we would start looking for labels that would show that the coffee has grown in its natural condition. So we'd say, well, it needs to be hand-picked and hand-selected because it is grown in its natural conditions. That's the only way you can pick the coffee. You're going to climb up a hill, you're going to handpick and hand select them. Attractive. Couldn't possibly go down those rows of coffee trees. So we look for handpicked and selected Smithsonian bird friendly because that would indicate the birds could migratory birds could rest on the trees.

They wouldn't do that in a fire and farm environments. Right. What we started to recognize is that the soil quality obviously feeds the nutrients in the plant and the nutrients in the coffee, void of the bad stuff, get really good quality soil, soil, soil for the coffee. So what we started to do now is we've just bought a farm in Colombia in a place called Toledo, and we're working on organic regenerative farming for coffee so we can create very high standards.

Coffee, Liver Health, and Sensitive Patients 13:07

And the reason that it matters is that if you, tilled farm, you industrially farm. So you shut up the soil, you till the farm, you release carbon into the atmosphere. Organic regenerative farming captures carbon from the atmosphere. So not only is it good for you, it's higher in antioxidants and it's more nutrient dense, but it's better for the poor. Largely is a better farming method that reduces, the carbon footprint of when I've actually eradicates the carbon footprint of coffee, I love it. Yeah, yeah, this is just it's such a good example of, you know, people are coining the term now sell you genesis.

Sort of like returning to health. Yeah. And how that has to happen on multiple levels. You know, we we as physicians to the world, we always focused on disease and pathology, you know, and this is helping focus on that. Returning to, you know, just like the soil and the plants, they're going to give you better, healthier fruits because they're healthier and just obvious to people. If we are ingesting healthier, healthier, foods and drinks, we're going to be healthier. And the work that you've been exploring with the antioxidant and benefits and how it affects.

And so I'll just I'd love to go down a little rabbit hole. You talked about you you you had some interesting conversations with experts in liver disease. Yeah. And and this because that's a big for our, our our patients. Yeah. Very early on, we were lucky enough to be introduced to Doctor Sanjay 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, another one called The Big Five.

And the reason I reached out to him initially is that in the Big Five, it's the five big things that you can do 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 in his first chapter he talks about, he said, look, there's a liver surgeon, 35 years, I haven't seen any one thing that you can drink that will have a better impact, will eat that will have a better impact on your liver. There's none of the things that people talk about, as positive to the liver as coffee.

So there's been some very large studies, umbrella studies, with over 200 different studies in the, looking at the liver, specifically. And it shows that from every cup from the baseline, you have a 20% lower chance of ever developing nonalcoholic fatty liver disease, liver cirrhosis, or any stage liver disease. So in other words, you drink two cups of coffee a day, you have a 40% lower chance of developing liver disease. You drink eight cups or four cups you have you have an 80% chance. I mean it's it's dose dependance.

And then most coffee is full of pesticides and mycotoxins. Yeah. And that negates so so the coffee I have this conversation is such an interesting problem. I had this conversation all the time. Is that the bad stuff and the good stuff and and clearly all of these studies have been done on coffee over the last three, four 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 don't we have to do some serious testing over the years. But but clearly having more antioxidants in the coffee. Well, just that, you know, good coffee, bad coffee. But coffee seems to be important. Yeah, I mean, so we don't really know what happens when you put all of the put this together. I mean, we've got a lot of pesticide residues on coffee. We've got sort of 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 in 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. You know, only time will tell whether it has a direct effect on your your health. But we can only say anecdotally. I mean, in four years now, we've gotten nearly 17,005 star testimonials from very passionate customers. And I'm not saying this is a sales pitch, but it's really just to look at the sort of feedback on a weekly basis of people who couldn't drink coffee and now can drink it.

I mean, it's really encouraging that we're in the right place. But when you say these people couldn't drink coffee and now they can, what is the difference where they were? They were moved up. Were they a bit sick? What what a lot of them is I mean, we have a big, foam with mast cell activation syndrome with a lot of people who are very sensitive, their histamine, allergies, mold toxicity. Some people just said, you know, I was 40 and woke up one day and I just couldn't stomach my coffee. And then I had to drink less and less.

And and it could be things just as as as strangers, you know, itching and skin conditions and stomach upset, nervousness. I mean, 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're being, you know, nervous energy, upset stomach, cold sweats that people recognize when they go. I had one too many cups of coffee. Just a good one. Too much? Yeah. Some, too much coffee. That really is a result of bad coffee.

Now, we can't tell you whether you've got a sensitivity to production functionality or pesticide residue or stale coffee. That's another issue. Freshness of coffee is very important for drinking stale coffee as a, as a as a nation. But anyway, so, so what I'm saying is it's just, you know, it's is we'll never know exactly what the cause is, but when we know we're going to remove the bad stuff and focus on just improving the good stuff, that that is much better tolerated. Yeah. Well, once again, you're showing that it's the Canaries.

I mean, because basically and you know, it's the people mast cell activation, histamine sensitivity, molds, mycotoxins, sensitivity these are all sensitivities of people whose systems are inflamed from some usually another source. Yeah. And finally the system starts to break down a bit, you know, and and you become more sensitive to whatever's whatever is in the environment that can inflame you. And these are our patients. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The, the and because I said the same thing to, to Amber and she, you know, she used the analogy of a glass of water.

You know, you can pour in water to a glass when it's half full, when it's completely fallen, it's tipping over. You just need a little drop of something and then you're spilling the water. Same thing with her sensitivities to to certain things. She's built a resistance now for coffee, something we drink every single day. So if you're drinking something that isn't as good for you as it can be, and you're drinking at 3 to 4 cups a day, I mean, it can have a real profound impact on your diet. So. Yeah.

Well, thank you so much. Yeah, it's been very interesting. And, what I look forward to learning more about the intricacies of, of, you know, not because it's, you know, the more I think about it is that the studies over the years on coffee, and I remember, you know, 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, you know, and it's just something that I'd love to explore with you more since it looks like you've done the work.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I'm a geek when it comes to coffee. Yeah. No, it's very exciting. So wonderful. Yeah. Pleasure. Thank you very much. You I thank you that was. That was great.