Is your Cup a Moldy One?
what invisible fungi in your coffee is doing to you
Drinking my morning cup of coffee and thinking about a recent blog post, “Is your cup a healthful one?” I realized I missed something very important! I forgot to mention the consequences of not choosing a healthful cup on your health.
Here’s a quick summary of what I call a healthful cup in case you forgot:
Clean Production- your coffee is produced in a sustainable manner free from pesticides
Ethical Interchange- your coffee costs what it is worth, thus you may pay a bit more to know where it comes from
Careful Preparation- your coffee is not burnt, it's lightly roasted and has intact its bioactive components
Loving Consumption- you enjoy fully your cup and feel joy drinking it
-Gosh Sofía, that sounds hella expensive! I’ll skip the ethical interchange part and go for a coffee I can actually afford. Do you just want us all to spend our entire paycheck? The coffee I currently buy tastes fine. It just needs a bit of cream and sugar to be a SLAM DUNK! That’s what I’m talkin' about—tasty and cheap!
-Look, I hear your concerns. You can continue doing what you’ve always done. I’m not here to change you and I definitely don’t want you to go broke. That being said, if you have time to sit down and read a blog post about moldy coffee, it is safe to assume you have the resources to spend a little extra buying a quality bag.
What I am saying is that there are consequences for not choosing a 'healthful' cup especially if you are going to drink it every day. Would you eat burnt, moldy bread every morning?
-Of course not.
-Then why are you okay drinking cheap-o coffee? It is completely burnt to a crisp, losing all of its potential benefits. I mean look at this list! Coffee has more than 1000 bioactive components including:
antioxidative
anti-inflammatory
anti-cancer
anti-fungal
antifibrotic
super yummy
-With all these incredible possibilities, what makes you still choose a coffee that has little to none of these active chemicals because they are burnt to hell in the process?
-I’m not convinced. Why do I need to choose a healthful cup?
-Great question. Have you heard about Toxic Mold?
-That sounds like the title of a horror movie.
-It might be the title of your Doctor’s order if you don’t make a shift in your consumption. Coffee may contain mycotoxins, the toxic chemical that mold produces. If you come to a coffee-growing region, you’ll understand why. The process of growing, picking, drying, cleaning, and storing coffee is loooong and arduous. If there are rainy days, the coffee may be a haven for mold. Makes sense?
-Yup.
-These mycotoxins can really impact your brain and cause serious nervous system damage. For example, there's a common mycotoxin called Ochratoxin A (OTA) that is found in coffee.
Symptoms of ochratoxin A exposure include:
Respiratory symptoms such as asthma
Chronic fatigue syndrome
Fungal skin rash
Dizziness
Pink eye
Hair loss
-I don’t like this blog post—this stuff is dark!
I’m not writing this to scare anyone away from coffee nor to make you feel like a bad person for consuming cheap coffee. I like to believe that we all do the best we can with the information we have at a given moment.
-Now that you have this new information, are you willing to try searching for a cup that complies with the four baselines: Clean Production, Ethical Interchange, Careful Preparation, and Loving Consumption?
-It can’t hurt. Except for the lovey-dovey part. I'll skip that for now. I guess I’m willing to spend a little more money buying a better bag of beans in order to feel better in the long run. I do notice I feel extra tired after my morning cup.
-It may be mold or it may just be the fact that you load your mug up with sugar and cream! In the next blog post, we can talk sugar.
-Noooo!
Hey friends,
Thanks for supporting these blog ventures. If you enjoyed or felt enriched by
this post, go ahead and share it with one or two people. While I only talk about the health repercussions or our choices, I want to note here that there are bigger consequences for our planet if we don't start to change the way we consume. We are all a part of the problems as much as we are part of the solutions. I hope you walk away from each post knowing how you can begin to heal yourself so that you can help heal the world. Yes, I dream big.
And remember, "with purpose, perseverance, and pain as our teacher, we can heal." -Sofía
PS. I would LOVE it if you dropped a comment below if you enjoyed reading this post. <3