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Coffee and Antioxidants

Have you heard the news? Coffee has antioxidants! Antioxidants have been studied to a great extent. The evidence that is becoming available today shows that antioxidants can potentially delay the aging process as well as protect the body against the development of age-related diseases.

If you read any medical articles that relate to these studies and you are not in the field of medicine, most likely you will get lost inside the information. This is where a problem in believing that certain foods containing antioxidants are good for you begins.

A very interesting study was conducted regarding coffee beans and the antioxidant benefits that could be obtained when consumed.

The article was very lengthy and had a great deal of medical terms and references in it. What the results proved was that although antioxidants did exist in coffee, when the beans were heated and processed, the benefits that can be obtained when drinking it, are diminished.

This is easier to understand when you can consider how the testing was done.

Using lab rats to test the effects of the antioxidants in coffee is misleading. Especially when the coffee was not simply ground up and processed in the normal human fashion where we place the grounds into a coffee pot and run hot water over it resulting in a pot of hot liquid which is of course coffee.

The testing in the labs involved breaking down the coffee bean into different parts. For instance, the skin was removed from the coffee bean and tested as to the amount of antioxidants it contained.

Why would they do this you might ask?

Well, the skin is where the highest amount of antioxidants can be found. Yet, we have to ask the question, "Who drinks just the skin of the coffee bean?"

Another problem with thinking any positive results meant that coffee is good for us is the fact that after coffee is brewed, it looses a great deal of the antioxidants through the heating process.

After testing coffee in various forms and breaking it up into several different components, at the very end of an extremely long description of medically challenging terms and data, it became clear that the lab test did not in fact prove coffee to have any antioxidant benefits when consumed as a hot stimulating drink.

In fact at the end of this article the bottom line was that there was no proof at all that coffee was good for us due to any substantial amount of antioxidants after the brewing process.

So, the bottom line here is...

Rumors can start very fast and become thought of as fact if we do not do our own research.

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