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Sucking the Joy out of Life
I like coffee, like most people. I don’t mind coffee grinds, so not only do I enjoy unfiltered or Turkish coffee, but I have also regularly enjoyed eating fresh ground coffee beans with ice cream or yoghurt or just some cream. Yummy!
But I learned some bad news recently: unfiltered coffee raises cholesterol LDL levels.
So I tried it. By using a paper filter in addition to the metal mesh, I dropped my LDL levels by 20+ points.
So now I am still addicted to coffee, but I don’t enjoy it anymore. I liked the flavor of all the cholesterol-raising oils and goodies. Coffee is good for people (3-4 cups a day is often an ideal benefit-balance), but not if it is unfiltered.
Once again I learn that things I enjoy are often not good for me; I am sure there is a lesson in there somewhere.
Bummer.
Published in General
Interesting. I’d have not thought of it, but then again I don’t pay attention to HDL vs LDL anyway. Can you experiment with making two pots, one with paper filtered coffee and one with mesh filtered coffee to see if you can add enough flavor back to enjoy it, but cut out some of the oil?
Is the lesson that we can pay too much attention to news?
Cheers!
So it actually worked? We see so many contradictory studies that you never know what to believe, but if it tests out, probably worthwhile. And yes, it sounds weird but fresh ground coffee on some good vanilla ice cream is really good.
Maybe give yourself a cheat day once a week where you drink unfiltered coffee. I wish I could devour all the yummy delicious delectable carbs my stomach can possibly hold, but alas, I can only consume so many. For some reason we can’t live out all our desires and not have it come back and destroy us. Tis our unfortunate lot. We can cheat a little and minimize the damage. I hate “all things in moderation” but it’s unfortunately true.
Cat vomit on good vanilla ice cream probably tastes good. I’ve never tried it btw. Vanilla ice cream makes everything better.
If you like something. If it tastes good. If it feels good. It is bad for you. That is just the way the world works.
In all seriousness, consider adding coconut oil. Explore it for yourself, but there are several benefits, and I imagine they outweigh any drawbacks and may even eliminate a few.
I don’t know if coffee is good for me, but it is life-sustaining for anyone who gets close to me before 9:00 AM.
My sister-in-law used to say, “Yesterday I read that this wasn’t good for me. The day before that, I read that this other thing wasn’t good for me. So I’ve decided to give up reading.” :-)
Yes, it worked. I added the filter and within a week my numbers were consistently down 20 points.
My doctor keeps trying to put me on statins. The filtered coffee bought me time.
Well, my doctor did put me on statins. We love coffee, but unfortunately, we already use paper filters. So that route isn’t open to me.
We also use the cold brew Toddy system, so we have even fewer oils to filter out. But we did that because while we like strong-ish coffee, we don’t like the bitterness.
My husband’s aunt used to work for Hood’s in Boston when they had a coffee shop near the North End. She later went on to run an Italian bakery in Malden, just outside Boston, so she knew a lot about food. :-) She told us once that to keep the coffee from being bitter, they used only fresh-ground coffee and they would put a pinch of salt and a couple of egg shells in the hopper where the coffee went.
Keep drinking it and you will soon enough find that you do enjoy it.
I am not much of a coffee drinker anymore, but I highly recommend the Toddy cold-brew system. It makes the smoothest coffee ever. My first husband and I used it, with Starbucks Sumatra coffee. He used to joke that he was the only person he knew who measured out his morning beverage with a shot-glass. One small drawback is you generate a pound of coffee-grounds all at once. They are supposed to be good for your garden.
Dearest iWe,
You know that you and your family are some of my favorite people around. (Or, if you don’t know that, then I don’t quite know what I need to do to convince you.)
But I only have one word to convince you of the perfidy of the woke, a word that might not resonate with you, but which is, perhaps, the most appropriate here:
BACON!!!!
Please pay no attention to the current conventional wisdom. Give it six, twelve, eighteen months, and it will all reverse itself.
Like much else, it’s just a troll
Love,
She
Dearest @she
I must confess that I have absolutely no idea what your comment means. Are you suggesting that bacon solves my cholesterol? Or that filtering coffee is somehow “woke”? What conventional wisdom will be reversed?
Please help! A good friend seems to have lost her mind!
LOL.
WRT bacon, I presume you don’t imbibe.
As for conventional wisdom, over the last couple of decades I’ve seen coffee, tea, butter, bacon, eggs, red wine, Lord knows what else, excoriated one moment as the agent of certain death, and held up in the next as the acme of healthy eating. Sort of the “what goes around comes around” theory of diet. So I don’t pay much attention to the apocalyptic suggestions anymore; I pretty much just eat what pleases me.
(Chocolate! Is in a realm of its own. I say no more.)
Thanks. That you’re worried about my state of mind is comforting, probably more than you know.
Thanks iWe I didn’t know about coffee can raise ldl cholesterol. I drink about two cups a day but it is filtered. I love good coffee.
Have some hummus during the course of the day to counterbalance the coffee and see what that does.
Correct.
I agree entirely on health fads. I have written on it myself more than once.
But… Do you think LDL levels are not actually important?
“But… Do you think LDL levels are not actually important?”
Some years back my physician told me that my LDLs were nothing to worry about, that they were the large, fluffy kind which are harmless, not the evil killer, tiny ones. I don’t think he expressed it exactly like that, but that was the gist. Perhaps a STEM graduate here can explain it better.
Anyway, at my age unfiltered coffee is likely the least of my bad habits (and worries). I’m hoping my leap from this mortal coil somehow involves wine or dancing, not coffee.
Just throw in some oil (or butter!) and dirt from your backyard and you’re back in business. ;-)
AH- same here. I have been roasting my own coffee for about 25 years, and used to use a french press. My triglycerides had skyrocketed so I went to a Technivorm brewer and, more often, a Chemex. My triglycerides dropped over 30%.
I now prefer the Chemex over the french press. For travel I take the clever coffee dripper and a manual grinder.
Yep. Lower your cholesterol because it’s linked to heart disease … Until it isn’t.
I believe this is one of the claims of the health industry that is currently being questioned.
Given their record over the past year, I’m skeptical that these health “professionals” really know anything at all. But damned if they aren’t super confident about how you should live your life, eh?
The ratio of HDL: LDL is more important and even with high LDL, it’s worth having a cardiac calcium score scan done before considering statins. They can be very nasty drugs and I wouldn’t consider them unless absolutely unavoidable. My doc has been bugging me about going on them because of high LDL (despite high HDL and a ratio that put me in the low risk range). She said she’d leave me alone if I had the scan. I did and my score was 0. As in Zero. My risk of a cardiac event in the next ten years is 1%. No statins for me!
Edited to fix dumb brain hiccup.
Exactly. The motto of the public health establishment ought to be “turns out we don’t know anything about anything.” They are the perfect example of tinkering with variables in complex systems and merely creating additional (or different) problems. Basically, one rule pretty much remains about the only true thing we know: “everything in moderation.”
That should be their tee shirt.
While we’re talking about things we can’t enjoy without penalty, here’s a little jazz we can enjoy in honor of Thelonius’ avatar: