James Hoffmann: Is Coffee Good for You? The Dumbest Question Asked This Century @James Hoffmann

Watch on YouTube · 2023-08-25 · 14 min

0:00 Hi guys, as requested I'm going to review a video called Is Coffee Good For You? by James Hoffman. It's a channel dedicated to coffee, one of the most toxic drinks you could possibly consume. Coffee is heated up bean water. I just wanted to say it out loud so that you understand what you're drinking.

[video] 0:29 Today, we're going to be answering the question, is coffee good for you? And it's a big question. It's one I get asked a lot and I understand it.

0:36 It's not a big question. It's very simple. As I said, coffee is heated up bean water. Some people call it bean soup. And that's what it is. There's incredibly many toxins, seeing as beans are insanely toxic, that's why we can't consume them raw. And the reason we consume coffee instead of raw, soaked bean water is because from the soaked bean water we would die, and from the coffee we don't if we consume smaller amounts, simply because a lot of the toxins have been destroyed. Of course, there's still way too many intact, such as phytic acid. There's also a very harmful ethylatoxin found in coffee, many harmful acids.

[video] 1:14 It's almost impossible to eat or drink anything these days without some awful tabloid rag telling you it's either gonna kill you and give you cancer or help you live forever. Now, the eagle-eyed amongst you might have noticed that I am not a medical professional. And I should say, none of this is medical advice. And him? He's not even sick.

[video] 1:34 So today, we're going to look at different areas of scientific research around coffee and health to see what we can learn. We are going to take the science seriously, even if maybe that's the only thing we take seriously today. Now, caffeine is one of the most studied substances on Earth, and it's humanity's psychoactive drug of choice, and that means there's actually quite...

1:48 Right, it's because people are essentially addicted to it. It tastes horrible, of course, seeing as it's bean water, obviously, but people get addicted to the adrenaline rush for the most part. There's also other chemicals involved. It's a biochemical addiction to the effects of coffee, not coffee itself exactly.

[video] 2:08 Quite a lot of research about coffee out there, too, for us to look at. But it's important to remember, scientific research like this is complex, often contradictory, and it is evolving all the time. So I'm not here to give you the last or final word on anything. So the first area we're going to look involves a terrifying phrase. We're going to look at the relationship between coffee and all-cause mortality. These are studies done asking the question, does drinking coffee make you die sooner? Now, if you're looking at the studies here, there's two types of studies. There's often meta-analyses, which are studies looking at a collection of other studies, trying to combine and compile all the data into one to look at broader trends. And then you have nutritional epidemiology, which tends to look at a population over a period of time, try and collect as much data as you can about them, and then...

2:42 Epidemiological studies are the joke of science. No scientist on Earth actually takes them seriously because they can be completely faked. And not even faked on purpose necessarily, it's that you can get any results that you want from epidemiological studies.

[video] 3:00 And again, look for trends or associations within that data. The news from the studies is pretty good. Drinking coffee has been associated with a reduction in all-cause mortality. The numbers are not universal everywhere, but one study showed a 4 cups a day, a 16% reduction in all-cause mortality, and a 21% reduction in cardiovascular heart disease. So this is great news! Let's just drink more coffee! Well, hang on, we need to look at the criticisms of this kind of work. Firstly, these are not your standard double-blind, very controlled trials. We're not taking a bunch of identical twins, splitting them in half, and giving one group coffee their whole life, and the other group no coffee their entire life.

3:30 Right, that would be pretty much the only way to do an actual scientific study. Take a hundred people, they don't even have to be twins necessarily, even though that would be ideal, obviously. Feed them the same thing for at least a year and then see the results. With coffee, for example, because of the phytic acid, you would see much lower iron levels in people who drink coffee. It would be very easy to prove this, but actual real scientific studies are not done almost ever.

[video] 3:59 Ethics committees seem to get in the way of these sort of things. And again, nutritional epidemiology has a bunch of critics out there who see a lot of limitations in those kind of studies. A lot of the data about what people eat and drink is self-reported. And even then, well, from my point of view, what exactly is a cup of coffee? Because if you look at the studies, well, it's not often clearly defined. And if it is clearly defined, often a cup of coffee is seen as being 125 mils. Right, we have no idea what exactly they drink, what else they drink, what they eat, how they generally live their lives. The way epidemiological association and correlation studies work is that you could easily prove that you will have an increased risk of

4:50 getting a brain tumor because you wear an umbrella while it's raining and the ones who don't wear an umbrella will have a decreased risk of a brain tumor. You can also very easily twist the numbers in these studies because they have nothing at all to do with science and usually they do this to sell you something. Most studies have been funded by companies.

[video] 5:14 is worth having a little bit of skepticism around studies like this. Now, we did touch on this briefly before, but there have been studies looking specifically at coffee and cardiovascular disease. And interestingly, they seem to come very often to similar conclusions. At three to four cups of coffee a day is the kind of strongest association between that and a reduction in cardiovascular disease. One study, though, did point out that any benefits you might gain are gone by the time you're drinking 10 cups of coffee a day, so maybe don't do that.

5:38 It would be impossible to lose the benefits of drinking coffee by drinking too much of it if it was generally good for you. You can't drink too much blood as long as you drink until satiation. No matter how much you drink, it will always be healthy for you because blood is generally healthy and coffee is generally unhealthy. Obviously, there's no scientific proof of coffee being in any way good for your heart, for your arteries or anything. I hope that that's needless to say.

[video] 6:06 Let's talk about caffeine and exercise. We know exercise is good for us, so does drinking coffee?

6:13 How do we know that? Oh yeah, the same way we know that coffee is good for us, right? Except that for exercise there's not even correlation or association studies that prove that it's in any way good for you. With coffee you at least have those religious so-called studies.

[video] 6:32 supporters doing a better job in the gym or in playing sports. There have been a lot, like a lot of studies done on caffeine and sports performance, to the point that while browsing I found one study titled, Not Another Caffeine Effect on Sports Performance Study. And I think at this point it's pretty well established that three milligrams to six milligrams of caffeine as a dose per kilo of body weight has a measurable impact improving endurance and peak power output.

6:50 Yes, I absolutely agree with that. If you pump yourself full of poison, any poison really, which is going to pump up your adrenaline, then you're going to have a lot more endurance. You're going to be insanely stressed. It's as if your body believes that you have been poisoned, you're dying and you need to detox from the coffee in this case, which is literally what you go through when you drink coffee. You go through a detox, which is why your adrenaline is rising, obviously. You could also inject small amounts of certain snake poisons. That would have a similar effect on your body. Don't do that, by the way. It would be incredibly unhealthy for you, but yes, your body would be going nuts.

[video] 7:30 I'm 90 kilos, so if I want to hit 6 milligrams per kilo, I need to get 540 milligrams of caffeine into my system. If I want to do that with filter coffee, that's going to be a lot of filter coffee.

[video] 7:43 Even if I went with espresso, it's like four or five double espressos before I hit the gym. Now, do remember, there are measured effects at three milligrams, so you don't have to go to six milligrams, and it's no bad thing to have a coffee before you hit the gym, but again, it's- That's actually very dangerous, very harmful advice.

7:58 There's been a lot of cases of people, especially bodybuilders, who got heart attacks because they drank too much coffee before a workout. They quite often black out.

[video] 8:08 They speculated that the positive benefits of coffee drinking didn't come from caffeine, but from the polyphenols found in coffee.

8:15 Polyphenols in general are very harmful for humans, and isolated doses of polyphenols are actually deadly.

[video] 8:23 And now we need to talk about coffee and the gut. By the gut, I mean the microbiome. A while ago, I spoke to Dr. Tim Spector about this.

8:30 Polyphenols are essentially antibiotics. If he's going to say that they are good for your gut, then just completely forget about this guy. He has no idea what he's talking about.

[video] 8:39 And it was very interesting. We'll start with those polyphenols that we mentioned. Now, polyphenols is a pretty broad category. They're typically defense chemicals in plants, and they also have antioxidant properties.

8:51 If you're a bit of a coffee nerd... No, of course not. There's no antioxidants found in plants which humans can use. There's never been one case. humans use cholesterol for example that's one of the most potent antioxidants which a human being can use that will be found in animal foods of course we can create a lot of it on our own but not enough

[video] 9:15 You might have heard of chlorogenic acids. Those are polyphenols found in coffee.

9:20 Now, if you want to maximize your polyphenols in coffee... Chlorogenic acid has literally been found to be a poison. It's actually an allergen to humans and other animals. That's obvious because it's found in beans. It is seeds. We are not supposed to consume them. There's nothing surprising about this.

[video] 9:41 But it isn't just the polyphenols in coffee that might have a beneficial relationship with our gut. There's also the fiber. Yep, the fiber. Now, when he told me this, I was a little bit confused. For me, growing up...

9:53 I'm also kind of confused because fiber is the indigestible part of a plant, but we'll see what he will say.

[video] 9:59 As a child, this was fiber, miserable breakfast cereal, or delicious vegetables, but it was not a cup of coffee.

10:07 Delicious vegetables. Which child has ever said that?

[video] 10:10 Turns out it is a cup of coffee. A typical cup of filter coffee might have up to two grams of fiber in it, maybe three or more if you're gonna supersize that thing. So I think on both polyphenols and fiber, we can say that coffee is good for our gut.

10:23 No, that proves that it's bad for your gut. Fiber is indigestible, it causes gut discomfort, and after a while you get IBS because you're consuming something which you are not supposed to consume. You're saying that antibiotics, polyphenols, and fiber, which is indigestible, is good for your gut? Congratulations, you're stupid.

[video] 10:41 Online, you'll find a lot of discussion about coffee and reflux, where people are talking about preferring either cold brew or darker roasts because they taste less as...

10:49 I can't focus on what he's saying because of the lovely British meadow.

[video] 10:54 I like how he's sitting in the shade even though you already don't get enough sunlight in the UK.

[video] 11:10 It's usually caused by coffee, come on, everybody knows this, but whatever, just live in denial.

[video] 11:30 Now, there are effects shown through a variety of studies on other diseases too, like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. There again, there is an association between drinking coffee and a lower incidence of those diseases. Now, it's early days.

11:43 Yes, but don't forget wearing the umbrella when it's raining.

[video] 11:47 I want to start with acrylamide. Now, acrylamide is a compound that is considered carcinogenic, and it is found in very small quantities in coffee. Now, the levels found in coffee are very, very, very low, way lower than you'd find in even a portion of...

12:01 There's many carcinogens which are found in coffee, such as the aflatoxin, which I mentioned before.

[video] 12:05 Now in those studies a reduction in liver and kidney cancers with coffee consumption popped up a few times, but there's no real consistent reduction in cancer likelihood associated with coffee drinking that's common across absolutely everything. And while I do feel no risk from drinking coffee, it is important to understand the limitations of these studies and the kind of conclusions that we can draw from them.

12:25 Associations, correlations, whatever, that doesn't matter. Coffee has carcinogens. Of course, cancer is something completely else than what you've been told, but I have a whole separate video about that.

[video] 12:36 So let's wrap it up. You know, I love making and drinking coffee. And that seems kind of wonderful because what's the point of a longer, healthier life if not to do more of the things that you love? Coffee feels like a gloriously virtuous circle in that regards.

12:51 I guess as a summary... Is he implying that you're going to live longer if you drink coffee because of... correlation and association, so-called studies, which are anti-scientific, literally. And I'm not kidding about the umbrella, by the way. This is anti-scientific. It completely goes against science. The chemicals in coffee are harmful. It's toxins from beans. That's the actual science behind it. Milk and blood don't have any carcinogens or toxins whatsoever. Meat also. That's what we are supposed to consume, not Heated up bean water, come on man, you don't need any studies to understand how unhealthy it is.

[video] 13:33 As long as it's not interfering with your sleep or your anxiety and you're drinking it in moderation, then it feels like the answer to the question is yes, coffee is good for you, which is a great relief.

13:44 Why does he call that relief? In proper English we call that denial in it His channel is based on coffee. Of course he wants you to believe that coffee is good for you, otherwise he may feel guilty. That's how he makes his money also. Of course he wants to keep this business alive. Do whatever you want with your life. Poison people if you want to, but don't make videos saying that coffee is in any way good for you. It tastes horrible, that's why people add milk or lots of sugar to it. You wouldn't add sugar to something that you like the taste of, obviously. It will always be unhealthy. Thanks for watching!