Read This Before Drinking Your Next Cup of Coffee

Coffee is something that many of us cannot even think of going without on our daily routine. The awakening aroma and strong spike provide a much needed boost to the start of our day. However, most people do not think of what coffee is doing to their body and recent research has shown that coffee does have many positive health benefits but also many negatives. Lets dive in.

 

Benefits of Coffee

Impact on Type 2 Diabetes – coffee has been shown in studies to lower the risk of developing type two diabetes which can cause more serious problems like stroke

Heart impacts – coffee drinkers have been shown to have less heart rhythm issues

Liver Cancer – a link between consumption of coffee and decreased rates of liver cancer

Negative Impact of Coffee

Coffee can potentially be a huge negative because it contains a high amount of caffeine and is very acidic.

For starters, if you have a cup of coffee in the morning, your stomach needs to utilize hydrochloride acid production, which needs to be used to digest large meals. So basically, your stomach won’t have as much of that hydrochloride acid to digest your food later on, which can lead to your food not being fully digested.

Heartburn, which many people suffer from can also be exacerbated by caffeine intake because it relaxes the lower esophageal sphincter which can cause heartburn.

The other main issue with coffee is that many people make an extreme habit of drinking it, and it can be extremely difficult to stop drinking coffee due to caffeine withdrawal. The caffeine in coffee releases dopamine into your body upon consumption and causes you to feel naturally high in a way. The issue with this is that if you need to stop caffeine intake, your body will feel “lower” and you’ll crave the adrenaline that coffee gives you. In this way, it really is similar to a drug.

Eating in General

In general, we should be focusing on consistently healthy eating habits because what we put into our body has a large impact on our happiness, energy levels and overall long term health.

GERD and acid reflux

A last major warning that relates to all of the above topics. You should focus on your eating habits on a consistent basis so that you do not get Gastro-intestinal reflux disease (GERD) as it is a serious issue that can seriously impact your life. With GERD, you LES does not close properly, letting stomach acids into your esophagus, and potentially into your throat. This can cause a lot of discomfort.

The threatening part about this is; your LES is a muscle that must contract and open, but it is not a muscle that you can control, so you cannot really strengthen it. (Other than through a breathing technique that has historically had mixed results).

The best thing to do is to prevent potential that you can get GERD, by doing the following:

Eat smaller meals throughout the day (4-5 instead of 2-3)

Do not east acidic foods (lemons, limes, fruits, coffee, spicy foods etc.)

Do eat plain foods like chicken, eggs lettuce etc.

Although this may be a tough type of diet, it will seriously lower your chances of developing GERD throughout your lifetime. (Again, this relates to coffee because coffee will definetly exacerbate this problem)

You may be wondering how on earth does all of this relate to personal finance? Well, your health can be a major determining factor in wealth accumulation so that you are able to work hard enough to improve your finances. The bottom line is that if your health is not in check, then it will make it very tough to have other parts of your life in order as well, so its very important to focus on it before everything. You can thank me later.