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Transcript

Kevin: Michelle, how are you doing?

Michelle: Well, Kevin, you may know that I've been researching this episode and I've come to some startling revelations about myself, but also about coffee.

Kevin: Which is astounding to me because I still think of you as the tea lady.

Michelle: I am the tea lady. But listen, I will always be the tea lady and I will always you will you will pry tea leaves out of my cold, dead hand. And I you know, I still believe that it is like the healthiest natural beverage on the planet. However, about 15 years ago, I quit drinking coffee or anybody that knows my story. I had a very, you know, a very unhealthy track record. It was like one of the things that, you know, I was over consuming and probably not in good quality. In addition, all those diet, dietary and lifestyle things that I needed to correct. But you know, we're going to have a couple of guests on later in this episode. And I'm so super excited and like mad respect for Jenna and Tomas. And it's because of, you know, wanting to really honor them as guests in the show that I wanted to brush up on my research. And I was astounded. I'm going to be honest with you. I'm going to be honest with the listeners and honest with any of you know, anybody out there in tea sommelier land that I that I either studied with or trained or encountered that the research on coffee has has changed somewhat since I, you know, last looked at it. And, you know, it's kind of funny that, you know, hindsight is 20, 20, as they always say. And it was the right thing for me to do to remove coffee in my diet at the time. However, looking back now with far more objectivity and far more perspective on the entire this is this is always what I talk about. Right. You have to look at the whole person.

Speaker 3: Yes.

Michelle: You have to look at the whole diet and lifestyle. We can't be reductionist about food. We can't be reductionist about beverages or even about, you know, specific lifestyle factors. It's not about exercise. It's not about vegetables. It's not about fruits or any like any one thing. It's about the sum of the parts.

Speaker 3: Right.

Michelle: And it's about both the inputs and the outputs. So I had an unhealthy relationship with coffee. And I also, if I'm really honest with you, I probably a majority of the time wasn't consuming really good quality coffee either. And that contributed to why I had so many, you know, unbeneficial responses to it, because I was like it was a ridiculous amount that I was that I was drinking when I was corporate. But I also wasn't sleeping. And I also had a crappy diet. And I also wasn't exercising regularly. And I also was quite, you know, working too many hours and not socializing enough. Didn't have enough love in my life. Like there were so many things that contributed to that. I it's it's interesting because when I made all of those changes, I made them at once. Right. I made the dietary changes. I made the lifestyle changes. And I quit drinking coffee and I started drinking tea. I, of course, experienced massive, massive benefits to consuming tea with its modulated caffeine release and the benefits of theanine that are neuroactive in the brain that helped to produce more GABA and put us in an alpha state, all of those things. But I've learned in my research that some of the things that were villainizing about coffee in the past, there's now so there's 15 more years of research where there's where there's larger studies over long periods of time. And, you know, I was you know, my view of coffee, if I'm really honest with you right now, was pretty reductionist. I I was I was focused on the fact that there was no cofactor in tea in coffee as there was in tea that helped to modulate this caffeine release. If people over consuming it to the extent that I was or perhaps at the wrong times of day or in poor quality, you know, the stress that that does to the adrenal glands and blood pressure and a whole bunch of other things. But what I've learned is I villainized it far too much. And there's so many startling benefits to I mean, I know that you felt this. I know that you're a coffee drinker. I would still be very much as a nutritionist, a promoter of moderation, even though I don't like that word. You know, I hate the word moderation, right? But you know what I mean? But but being more moderate in your coffee drinking and not abusing it like where I was having like 10 to 12 like giant ones today.

Kevin: As every university student does. I did that like.

Michelle: Yeah. Or corporate. Like it was how it was my crutch to go from meeting to meeting to meeting all day long.

Kevin: Yeah. And sometimes that was your only break in the day too. To go to the coffee machine or to go down to the cafe in the bottom of your building and grab a coffee. And that was the only five minute break that you could take if you're running from meeting to meeting. And so that became it was, you know, the the the the the mental breathing space that you needed.

Michelle: Yeah.

Kevin: But it promoted drinking a whole lot of coffee.

Michelle: It did. And it was also very it was also social and sometimes strategic, too, because sometimes you couldn't get ahold of people or they weren't answering your emails. You could find them always one of two places in the coffee line or in the smoking area.

Kevin: Exactly. Yes. Hey, I've been looking for you. I knew that you were going to take your coffee break at this time.

Michelle: You can run, but you can't hide from me. Yeah. So anyway, I wanted to dive into this a little bit. And so it made me very curious, but I'm seeing more and more so many parallels between coffee culture and tea culture, between the quality of coffee and quality of tea. The polyphenolic benefits of tea drinking, the polyphenolic benefits of coffee drinking, the beneficial aspects of responsible quality tea drinking and coffee drinking in terms of the effects of caffeine because caffeine gets villainized. But caffeine is a really wonderful nutrient if it's, you know, not not used as a weapon.

Kevin: Don't weaponize caffeine.

Michelle: Right. That should be a T-shirt.

Kevin: Yeah, exactly.

Michelle: We can add that. So I got very curious and I went down many rabbit holes.

Kevin: Which you are very good at doing, Alice.

Michelle: I want to do and I have to say that's my drug. That's my drug is going down. Nutrition rabbit holes.

Kevin: Instead of caffeine. It's scientific research, yeah.

Michelle: Yeah. So I know that you are so well-traveled, Kevin. Have you ever been to Yemen?

Kevin: I have not, no.

Michelle: I have not either. And I can't say that it's a place that I thought about going to. But Yemen comes up in all of the, you know, the history of coffee culture. They say that the first credible evidence of coffee being consumed as a modern beverage where it was roasted and brewed was around 15th century Yemen, particularly in Sufi shrines.

Kevin: OK, OK.

Michelle: Do you know this?

Kevin: Yeah, I knew that. I'd heard that it was Middle Eastern, generally. But that's about as close as I could possibly get.

Michelle: And I was I was quite honestly not curious about it before now. So this is the first time I've looked that up. But one of the things that predates this, you know, it being consumed as a modern beverage, we have these we see these origins of tea much, much earlier than that, where people are chewing on the leaves, you know, as a stimulant and things. And you know that that is the same with the history of tea culture. Tea was tea was a food and then and a medicine and then a beverage. And very similar in coffee history. I found that fascinating. So after Yemen, it spread throughout the Middle East, like you said, and then North Africa by the 16th century and then eventually to Europe. And Yemen is also the first place where coffee was actually cultivated agriculturally and sold commercially. So globally, you know, one of our favorite taglines in tea culture is that tea is the most consumed beverage after water. And that is still true. Tea is consumed more than coffee, but coffee would be next in line as the most popular beverage consumed in the world. And we know in North America, it's the only continent where the culture is more coffee drinking than tea drinking. And we we think that that shift in culture came as North America was colonized was because of the Boston Tea Party.

Kevin: Right, right, right. There was a big anti-tea movement in that time. And then, of course, when Seattle joined the United States, then it was all over.

Michelle: Then it was game over.

Kevin: Then it was exactly like once Seattle was established, it's like this is going to be the epicenter of the coffee revolution.

Michelle: There you go. Yeah, it just became unpatriotic to drink tea. And so, you know, some that that kind of left a door open for to increase coffee consumption. It also opened a door to the increase in the prevalence in North America of using herbs, the herbs that are indigenous to North America and as to herbal teas and things like that.

Kevin: Right.

Michelle: But yeah, so the rest is history.

Kevin: It brings us to pumpkin spice lattes to today's world.

Michelle: Well, you know, spices do have do have this rich polyphenolic compounds in common with both coffee and tea in coffee. So when we talk about the phytonutrients, polyphenolic compounds, which are the antioxidant or the protective compounds in foods, we really refer to them generically as polyphenols when we are talking about tea. But there's a particular type of phenolic compounds in coffee known as the chlorogenic acids. So our CGA's and they are those abundant antioxidants that are protective, that are part of, you know, the coffee bean. But they also, aside from having their health benefits, they impact flavor and aroma, et cetera. Very similar to when we're looking at tea and we're looking at the catechins and the epigallic catechins and all of those things. Like, so again, these parallels in coffee, it's these compounds that give coffee its ability to lower our blood pressure within hours. It's interesting that I learned it can have an effect on both the systolic and the diastolic blood pressure. So when you take your blood pressure reading, you have those two numbers, one over top of the other. So it actually impacts both of them, which is really interesting. The reason that there's so many health benefits to the antioxidant compounds in coffee is because they take up about six to 8% of the dry weight in the Arabica and potentially even more in the other type of coffee, the Robusta. They can be reduced slightly depending on roasting. So dark roasting the coffee beans can reduce some of that CGA content. And if it's really dark roast, it can actually reduce, according to the Food Function Journal, up to like 90%. But we don't lose all of it though. So if that's one of the reasons that you're drinking coffee, this journal suggests choose a lighter roast or a medium roast. But what we've known for a very long time, and I knew this even 15 years ago, is that there are supposed cardiovascular health benefits to coffee drinking. One of the interesting ways that I've heard it put, it's like a J-shaped curve where we see the cardiovascular disease risk prevention or mitigation that it starts out, we see this increase of the benefit of drinking coffee, but then there is a threshold where then it starts to decline. And that sweet spot seems to be between two to four cups per day will confer the risk reduction or the potential benefit from these polyphenols in terms of cardiovascular health.

Kevin: Oh, wow, that seems much higher than I would have expected. That's interesting.

Michelle: When they measured that, I think it was a European cup of coffee. It's 4.2 fluid ounces is a European coffee cup. So, but more and more, in the quantities that I used to drink when I was a very unhealthy person, you actually start to introduce risk as opposed to benefit to that higher caffeine content. But timing is also important. You know, if you're, are you drinking it like all during the day, like, and then not drinking in the evening, are you drinking it the whole time? So there's, you need to look at the whole person and you kind of need to look at the behavior and you need to look at what's going on with that person as to whether they're having a deleterious effect from that that's, you know, potentially attributable to their coffee consumption as opposed to all of the other things that they're doing in their diet and lifestyle, right? We do a little bit later in this episode, I talk about the cholesterol rising factor, but I just want to talk about kind of what that is. Like there's these little diterpenes, are the name of the compounds, they're lipids. You know, when you brew a coffee and there's like a little oily, like looking bit on top, those are, that's what these diterpenes are. They're this little oily stuff. They make up only about like 1% of the bean. They didn't know for a long time that this was an issue in humans because of course, as we've talked about many times in these episodes, their first tests on it were on rats and there was no impact on rats. And then they tried it apparently, oh, poor animal kingdom, this is breaking my heart. Hamsters and then monkeys. Oh, I absolutely hate to hear that. But there was no cholesterol raising when they tested on those animals, but they did find when they started to do human trials that it did raise LDL cholesterol in human beings. But there was, it was the brewing styles. So we talk about this a little bit later when we're talking to our friends about their particular one. But, you know, if a person is concerned about their cholesterol, the continuum of cholesterol raising diterpenes in coffee is really based on preparation. So lowest to highest, there's the lowest in, if you're using paper filters, there is a little bit more, but still less if you have instant coffee. And then it goes percolator, then espresso, then French press, then Turkish, and then boiled coffee. And they used to think that it was like the coffee filter being the lowest. They used to think the magic was the filter, but now they know the magic is the grounds. There's a small amount that's removed by the filter but it's really when you're, when the grounds are kept completely, completely separate from the brew, that's what it is, right? But, you know, I think people who have a healthy diet and lifestyle probably don't have that concern and they're probably responsible about their, you know, their moderate use of coffee as a beverage. And it's probably not an issue for most people.

Kevin: The amount of cholesterol that would be raised in coffee, like it wouldn't push you over the edge or anything if you're having a moderate amount daily. So yeah, it's, again, it's part of the entire diet and lifestyle and everything. So coffee's not going to cure your cholesterol or push you over the edge. It's everything else.

Michelle: Absolutely right. And this food research journal in 2017 acknowledges just that, that concentration matters to cholesterol levels. And it's not huge, but it's not negligible if you're a person with concerns. But if you're a person that doesn't have concerns that is otherwise reasonably healthy, this probably doesn't even matter to you. So it's more about knowing if you're that person that should worry about it. Right. And then I would suggest as a nutritionist, you want to kind of look at, you know, are you consuming too many eggs or any other cholesterol raising foods in your diet? Are you getting enough sleep and getting enough exercise and other things? Really, really huge in the coffee benefit space of the neurological benefits. There are so many neurological benefits. And this, again, mimics very much, you know, some of the surprising benefits of tea drinking. Research around the benefits of coffee drinking are the neurological benefits, neuroprotective benefits, as a matter of fact. We talk with our guests a little bit later, specifically about Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. And that's pretty exciting. I won't go into that too much here. But, you know, it's similar to cardiovascular disease. It has to do with the power of the polyphenols of those protective compounds. You know, there's also the caffeine content in this context is actually protective. It actually is a plausible explanation to some of the risk reduction because of its psychoactive nature. So, you know, as long as you're not overdoing it, it can be really beneficial. In fact, this one study calls out, much to my delight, that some research suggests that combining coffee and tea consumption into your regular consumption can offer even further protection than either coffee or tea alone.

Kevin: Variety of space of life, makes sense.

Michelle: And I think, you know, I have, you know, I set coffee aside for so many years I think as a result of this, I'm not necessarily going to start drinking it every day, but I'm now going to enjoy the occasional cup of coffee if that's what I feel like, right? And probably stick to the morning. But I want to just along those neuroprotective aspects, there is a brand new study, like it's so brand new that it's not even like peer reviewed and fully published yet. But it was, yeah, very hot off the press. So it was, you know, presented very recently at a big conference. The study followed over 47,000 middle-aged female nurses under the age of 60 for three decades, Kevin. So for 30 years. So the tracking of this data started in 1986 when I was still in high school. And researchers asked women questions about their diet, such as how much coffee, tea, cola, and decaffeinated coffee that they drank. And then they went on to analyze how many of those women met their requirements for, you know, quote unquote, healthy aging, which they defined as living to age 70 or older, maintaining good physical, cognitive, mental health, being free from 11 major chronic diseases, including heart disease, stroke, type two diabetes, cancer, and among others. And then in 2016, researchers determined that 3,706 of the women met their criteria and they were able to make a definitive link that their caffeine intake contributed to those beneficial outcomes. So while past studies have linked coffee to individual health outcomes, this study was the first to assess coffee's impact across multiple domains of aging over three decades. And it suggests that caffeinated coffee and not tea and not decaffeinated coffee may uniquely support aging trajectories that preserve both mental and physical function. So like, and that, I think, I love that they've positioned this as a healthy aging study because we often think about healthy aging as the absence of physical ailments, right? But I think more of us equate our mental capacity, our mental health far more than, you know, being able to continue to like run 10K effortlessly or whatever, do you know what I mean?

Kevin: No, having your wits about you and being mentally there is super important as you age. Absolutely.

Michelle: So another, you know, fairly recent research that I dug up that I thought was interesting, there was a Dutch study that published in the European Journal of Nutrition that found that those drinking two or more cups of small cups of coffee daily had lower risk of age-related frailty due to the antioxidants that support muscle strength, metabolism, and cognition. So again, this neuroprotective, but also muscle strength and metabolism. So that's pretty cool. And so like frailty is a really important marker in gerontology or, you know, the primary care of the medical care of old people because there's so many risks when a person not just ages, but they age and they become physically frail, right? The study found that antioxidants, polyphenols, bioactive compounds in coffee help to reduce inflammation, help to maintain muscle mass, help to improve metabolic health, all of which are required to, and contribute to preventing age-related frailty. The study also found that decaffeinated coffee was also associated with a lower risk of frailty, suggesting that non-caffeine components are key. So it's probably more of those antioxidant compounds than it is the caffeine.

Kevin: The caffeine itself, right.

Michelle: But what they also found was that when excess sugar or heavily sweetened syrups are added to the coffee, that it cancels out those health benefits.

Kevin: That makes sense. Yeah, absolutely.

Michelle: Yeah. And so this, again, was a European-sized cup of coffee in this study. Now, here's the benefit that gets me most excited. Like those are also very exciting, but any study that can actually show a statistical significance in reducing all-cause mortality is always very interesting to me. So all-cause mortality is defined as death by any cause, but they've actually refined this further. And in this study, they looked at all-cause and cardiovascular mortality. So data showed that one to three cups of black or low-sugar, low-fat coffee can lower the risk of death by up to 17%, and particularly death from cardiovascular causes. So how crazy is that? I don't know how they prove, like I'll read more about what it says here, but the idea to me is crazy that you can isolate and correlate.

Kevin: That coffee is 17%. Wow, interesting. Right.

Michelle: So it's a relatively new study in the Journal of Nutrition and found that drinking one to three cups of black caffeinated coffee per day is linked to a lower risk of death from all causes and death from cardiovascular disease, and that adding sugar and saturated fat eliminates the benefits. They used data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys from 1999 through to 2018, and they linked it to National Death Index Mortality Data, which included a nationally represented sample of over 46,000 adults aged 20 years and older. So that's a big survey. Yeah, so anyway, it's fairly new. Time is going to tell, but those were like new things that came up. Like, you know, in the past, it was all about the detriments of overconsumption of caffeine and stress on the adrenal glands. The adrenal glands are our stress glands that sit on top of our kidneys, and, you know, anyone that has suffered from work stress and burnout, you know, usually it's adrenal fatigue that happens, and we can do that to ourselves without coffee and without caffeinated beverages, but adding the caffeinated beverages to it just adds insult to injury, which is why often people are told, you know, to cut down on their, or traditionally told to cut down on their caffeine consumption, but what these studies are telling us is that we're getting away from the eliminate coffee from your diet narrative and more to drink better quality coffee and just reduce your consumption, and I love how that one study correlates. Maybe you want to do some tea and coffee consumption, but they're all agreeing on avoiding the sugar, avoiding the adding the fats, avoiding, you know, whatever to the coffee. Now, one interesting thing, Kevin, and then I will stop and breathe for a second, is that all of these beneficial antioxidant compounds that we find in the coffee, same as with tea, as soon as we add milk, like from dairy to it, it cancels out all of those benefits, and it has to do with the casein protein in the animal milk binds to those compounds, and it basically neutralize them. We don't absorb them. We don't see the same problem when we use a plant milk, like whether it's soy milk or oat milk or whatever. Now, I just want to talk just a little bit about some of the detriments that we still have, and so it's the same with, and I would say it's the same with tea drinking, particularly if you're consuming, if you really enjoy the highest caffeine content teas, such as matcha or gyokuro, when you consume is just as important as to what you consume and how much, right? Caffeine has a very long half-life, and it, you know, it hangs out in our bloodstream, and, you know, also some of us are fast metabolizers, and some of us are slow metabolizers of caffeine. That can be somewhat in play, and we talk about this a little bit later on when we interview our guests, but the long and the short of it is that where that's a problem is with sleep, like sleep disturbances, and aside from the fact whether, you know, somebody gets agitated or anxious or jittery, I'm more concerned with their sleep, and sleep disturbance is one of the biggest detriments in lifestyle that is the most overlooked by people, and it's the biggest one that has a downstream impact on our physical and our mental health, right? If we're not sleeping, there's only a couple of days can go by that we can even function, right? So a lot of people also don't realize that we think of sleep as a passive state, but it's not. Sleep is an active state. We have a lot going on in our brain. I think I mentioned recently in another episode that we actually have this beautiful process that happens when we sleep that helps to, you know, our brain to detoxify, and I think I use the term take out the garbage, so because there's all of these different stages of sleep, so even if you're only sleeping a couple of hours or three or four hours even, like you're missing some of those essential stages that, you know, are really important to having really good quality sleep. So it's not just the length of time that you spend asleep, it's how much you get in each one of those cycles and how much deep sleep do you get and how much light sleep, how much REM do you get, et cetera. If you are drinking these highly caffeinated beverages later in the day, then it can be one of the major contributors to impacting your sleep. Now, some people will say, I can drink coffee till late in the evening and it doesn't impact me, I sleep just fine. But I've heard researchers say, you may think that you're getting lots of sleep, but are you getting good quality sleep? So if people are having other issues while they're awake that they want to address to feel better, that maybe they should just maybe back off the coffee in the evening and see if the sleep improves. If your sleep doesn't improve, like if it stays the same, well then fine, maybe that's not the issue. But it could be. Unless there's something different about your coffee that you're drinking, right? And that leads us to the next part of our episode today.

Kevin: Exactly. Where we will bring in our special guests. Special guests, I hope you're ready. And learn about what they're doing and what they have literally invented that is unique about how coffee can be different. Why don't you say hi, special guests?

Jenna: Hello.

Tomas: Hi, everybody.

Kevin: There we go. See, they're not just figments of our imagination. They're actually here. So why don't I do a quick introduction on each of them, just to give a little bit of background, and then we can jump into the discussion because I want to hear all about coffee and everything, their story, and you name it.

Michelle: Amazing. Can I introduce Jenna first?

Kevin: Of course. Go ahead.

Michelle: Awesome. Awesome. So Jenna Goodhand, my dear friend, is a multi-passionate entrepreneur. And that bio description does not lie, if you have ever met this incredible woman. She has a master's degree in international economic relations, where she focused on food politics, specifically the impacts of political structures on genetically modified foods and food security. Currently, she's the owner of Cafezia, a wellness-focused coffee brand. Jenna blends her academic expertise with her passion for health, sustainability, and community impact. I like what you did there in your bio there, Jenna, blends. Her work centers on creating products and initiatives that merge purpose with positive change, drawing on her experience building multiple six-figure businesses in coaching, public speaking, and wellness. Guided by belief in intentional living, environmental responsibility, and deep human connection, Jenna continues to champion food and wellness innovations that support both people and the planet. And Jenna, you know that I am your number one fan. And there is absolutely no exaggeration to that bio. We have collaborated on many things back when I had my tea room. And they were all purpose-driven, community-focused, very intentional events. We had so much fun. And you are so much more than the coffee entrepreneur. So much more. So welcome to the podcast. Kevin, I'm delighted for you to introduce our other guest.

Kevin: Okay, absolutely. So our other guest is Dr. Tomas Dobranski. And I said that correctly? Okay, good. Phew, I got the head nod. I'm so glad. Tomas has a PhD in biochemistry and he has more than 35 years of experience in research with particular expertise in protein chemistry, molecular proteomics, cell biology, immunology, and neuroimmunology. I don't even know what half of that is. But we'll get into that. It sounds super, super important. Way over my pay grade. In 2005, he developed Cafezia, which is coffee that's combined with a small amount of three ayurvedic herbs. And we'll certainly be hearing more about that in this episode. He's also developed other original products, all intended for helping people have a higher quality of life and supporting the active prevention of general health-related issues. Was that more or less a good summation, Tomas?

Tomas: Yes, thank you.

Kevin: Excellent. Well, so glad that both of you could make it onto the podcast. This is truly going to be a fun episode, I think. And Michelle, did you want to kick off with the first question?

Michelle: Just to understand, they're probably confused as to how these two incredible people are related. So I'm wondering, Jenna, can you kind of give us a little synopsis as to how you two came together?

Jenna: Well, energetically, universally, I think we were destined.

Michelle: Of course.

Jenna: I call Tomas my brother at this point. So Cafezia was the initiator for us finally meeting. I discovered the product probably late 2020. I'd been searching for coffee alternatives or coffee that didn't give me jitters, anxiety, heartburn. And the alternatives were just not coffee. Either they didn't taste like coffee or I wasn't getting that clarity and focus. So by chance, I met this woman who was working with a company and I became an immediate fan. I just loved this coffee so much and I just wanted everyone to drink it. And we became hiking buddies and there was an opportunity to buy the company. So Michelle, you know me, something kind of crazy comes up and I think... I love this coffee. I want to buy the whole thing.

Kevin: Yeah, exactly. That's quite a reaction.

Jenna: I don't know how to do this. Let's try. So I bought the company in, I think it was March of 2021. And when I met Tomas, I just, I mean, once you know him, you just love him right away. He's a bit of a mad scientist. I hope he's okay with me saying that. But what is so fantastic about him and what makes me feel so good about the foundations of this product is not only that it reduces the negative effects of caffeine and coffee, like the heartburn, the jitters, the anxiety, it keeps everything you love, but he really cares about people. He really cares about making the world a better place. He is so passionate about coming up with solutions to our health challenges that are everywhere in very simple ways. And what's so great about it being coffee with Kefetsia, you don't have to change anything. You're already making coffee every day. You're already drinking it. You just drink a better version of it. And I just love that. So it feels good to have this partnership, to know the really authentic beginnings of it. It's changed my life. I love hearing from other people that they can drink coffee again, or that they don't have the side effects. And it really feels like a magic brew. So that's how we came into each other's lives. And I'm very fortunate. We've developed a friendship beyond the coffee at this point, but we do have many coffees together. And, um, yeah, so I'll, I'll see if the story lines up with how Tomas about me, there's the test. Yeah.

Michelle: Yeah. Tomas, um, please like comment on that and tell us your side of the story.

Tomas: Well, first of all, I'm more than happy to have, uh, Jenna on board and taking care of Kefetsia. She's excellent mother of this beauty product, which really helps a lot of people. I will go back before 2005, how I met Brian Martel. Brian Martel was general manager at the time of heritage, a coffee roasting company in London. They can roast 18,000 pounds coffee a day before class. Wow. So it's really a huge factory. And we met, uh, when we ran trails together with Brian and we became running buddies and friends. So there is a lot of association with, uh, sport activities, which, uh, one huge area of Kefetsia users are people very active in physical activities, but also mental. I will come back to this. So we ran with Brian and he asked me, what do you think, Thomas, we finish running. We are tired. Should we have coffee or not? And I didn't have any clue. He's a coffee expert. And I told him, Brian, it depends how healthy you are. If you are mentally sound and everything's okay. And you are not too tired to have coffee. If you are very tired, don't have coffee because you will disrupt your dopamine. And he was, Oh my God, who are you, Thomas? We didn't know what we are doing. And I told him I am in brain research for all my life, basically since I did my post up in Paris and France, 1990. So it's been a while. And I started to talk about how caffeine works in the human body. Brian knew a lot of it, but I, we went to the further details and he was amazed and we stopped running. And he's asking me Thomas, but you know, 40% people, roughly over 40 years of age, they have to stop drinking coffee. And I was like shocked because it's a huge number. And now as Michelle said, it's, it's a, you know, you come home, you sit with your friends, you sit with your relatives and you have a coffee. It's kind of custom, which bring us together. We, you know, we enjoy a cup of coffee, which we share with people around, we discuss, et cetera. So I told Brian, you know, caffeine, it's a very tricky compound. It's a can behave as a good fellow could be very bad. So, you know, when you create auto-human conflict in human body, it could lead you even in the good thing or bad things. It depends how you react, how your body can accommodate this new thing. So we started to talk. And at the end of the discussion, he asked me, Thomas, can you some define this caffeine from coffee to eliminate the potential side effects? And I told him, Brian, I will look at it and think about this. So I came home and I started my calculation because to me, it's a challenge to solve the problem. So, so I put some formula, I am formula. I like chemical formula. And I always see the interaction of molecules, how they talk, because you have to go in the regulation of life. And it's all about talking in cell. We have 5,000 reaction in one second, and it's everything about nice talking. If you are not nice, you get in the disease. So we name it cell signal transaction pathways or cell signaling pathways. And in the healthy cell, it's everything is well-organized and everybody's nice. Once there is a problem and conflict, you get in stage of the disease or organized pathological process. So I put few formulas together and I was coming back to it constantly and started to do calculations. And a few months later, I told Brian, okay, Brian, we will buy a few herbs and start to mix it with coffee and we will see what happens. And he was just like that. And then he was just like that. So I went to Heritage Coffee and we started to do several setups and tasting, you know, because due to the measurement of activation and inhibition of caffeine, this would cost millions and millions of dollars and statistics. So he had coffee experts, they tried coffee and you see the impact and maybe you start to sweat, you start to shake. We made very strong coffee and start to combine herbs. At the end, we find the formula, which is combination of three ayurvedic herbs. It's cleavers, yerba mate, and hyssop.

Michelle: So this started out as just a hypothesis that you had?

Tomas: No, no. I, you know, I knew there are herbs, they can teach caffeine to be better. Okay. But now in, in pharmacology, which goes in every life step we do, it's a dose response and time course. How much you use for how long of the time? Half-life of caffeine is three to seven hours in human, but depends on, you know, what is your stage or with your process of metabolism? How healthy is your large colon? Never forget large colon is the first brain. Our brain is the second. Huge insult, but that's how it is. So, and it's widely accepted those days, but I knew what you, what alkaloids and other flavonoids and other compounds are your cleavers and hyssop. And I knew that in leaves or yerba mate, there is caffeine, better one. And why this caffeine is better, not so harsh and aggressive for some people in coffee, because there are other compounds which goes with this caffeine and regulated metabolism.

Michelle: So one, one thing that immediately jumped to mind to me when I saw the three herbs, yerba mate is also a caffeine herb. So does food, how does that work synergistically? Thinking about food synergy and how you combine things together, that they truly become the sum of their parts in terms of their nutritional benefit, instead of leveling up to the one consumption that has the most, they kind of layer on top of each other like building Lego blocks. So I was concerned when I saw that, doesn't it increase the caffeine content or how does that work?

Tomas: You know, keep in mind that the amount of yerba mate in the mixture is very, very little. Very small. Just a few molecules. It's those response. You don't even feel yerba mate there. What we need, it's few molecules of caffeine, which will interact with other alkaloids in yerba mate.

Michelle: Yes.

Tomas: And after you mix it with other sorts of caffeine, which is coffee, and we go in the world of second law of thermodynamics and the reliance of entropy of interactions, how strongly they interact, how they regulate the physiological process. In context of caffeine, you look how caffeine will penetrate blood brain barrier and bind to dopaminergic receptors. And if you lower a little bit this affinity, you will not bother people when they drink coffee to sleep. You will not induce shaking, sweating, etc. etc. So yerba mate brings something better. You put caffeine of coffee, you extract those alkaloids in yerba mate from other sources like cleavers and hyssop. And all together, you diminish this dissociation constant of caffeine when it blocks receptors, which prevent dopamine to induce sleeping, to be more quiet, to get a healthy boost and working instead of sweating, shaking, introducing heartbeats or another cardiovascular discomfort.

Kevin: I just want to repeat this back to you because I want to make sure that I understood this because I'm going to take it down to the noob level. OK, so Tomas, you are clearly much more intelligent than I am. And I just want to make sure that I understand. So putting it in really, really simple terms, you know, what do they say? Explain it to me like I was a grade four kid. So the caffeine is still there in the coffee. It's not decaffeinated coffee. There are these three additional herbs and in very, very small, small doses that I'm just as a side, does it affect the taste at all? No, not at all.

Tomas: If you are sommelier, you have your tongue and the root of your tongue very well trained. You can feel a little bit of herby taste, just a bit. But usually people, they don't feel anything. It's 100% full arabica beans, the best quality. We add mixtures of two percent of her and it doesn't sense. Sensorically, there is no right.

Kevin: OK, so you've you've got just regular coffee, excellent quality coffee, but regular coffee. It's not decaffeinated. You add these three herbs and it doesn't these three herbs don't take away the caffeine. They just change how your body processes it. Is that the metabolism?

Michelle: I think it changes how you metabolize it. Is that right?

Tomas: Yes. Yeah. I will be a little bit like childish. And I guess those three herbs will teach quietly to be caffeine. Let's address. OK, I like that. I like that. They're the calm down. Don't be aggressive. Everything's OK. You help and not to just go and metabolize. So the right.

Kevin: So the caffeine is still there. It's just your your body is treating it differently.

Tomas: And Kevin, we we sell a lot of caffeine in Italy, mostly in Fiesta, which is capital of the world for the best coffee. You have illy coffee. You have a lot. You have other big companies. Imagine that people start to replace decaf with cafezia because it gives you boost. There is no side that white people drink because they are sensitive to caffeine. Right. That's acidity. That's that's. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. But mostly allergic, metabolically allergic to caffeine. Now you replace this with cafezia, because to me, drinking decaf is like having a shot of non-alcoholic vodka. So what do you have? You have a shot of water.

Kevin: Well, well, I just want to clarify in that, you know, for me personally, I have decaf coffee just because because you like. And yeah, it's the flavor. It's I love the flavor of coffee and no, I don't want to be offensive, 21, but no pumpkin spice lattes for me, like no sugar. I just want coffee flavor. But the caffeine, I think I drank too much of it in university. But I'm really curious to try it. But my main concern actually was the flavor and the taste. So it seems that's not an issue that you can't taste because there's so few herbs. So thank you for clarifying that and taking it down to a very baby level for me.

Jenna: Can I add something about the taste? So Tomas didn't touch on this, but the coffee is also lower in acidity because of the herbs, which actually does improve the taste. It makes it smoother. So even people who are not caffeine sensitive really like it because it's a smoother taste. You can get the coffee notes a little bit more. And so not only are you not forgoing any of the flavor, it's actually a better flavored coffee as well.

Kevin: Oh, wow. I guess that makes sense. If you reduce the acid, it makes sense that the other flavors would come through.

Michelle: Jenna has a wonderful elevator speech that she explains to people. Can you can you rhyme it off? Do you know that? Do you know the little line that you always introduce people to the product?

Jenna: Well, I really want to try Tomas's about getting the herbs to just calm down and be like, I really like that. So I just came from a demo, so it's fresh on my mind. But Kefetsia is premium coffee infused with tasteless herbs that changed the way coffee tastes and feels in our body. It the herbs lower the acidity and slow the release of caffeine. So you get all the things you love about coffee, like great taste, clarity and focus without the negative side effects like jitters, anxiety and heartburn.

Michelle: Yeah, so that's amazing. And, you know, it's so smart the way that you've encapsulated this. And you know, it really is a paradigm shift for the customer and for the coffee drinker, because it's almost like the public has accepted, you know, I'm going to have to stop drinking my coffee after this point in time. And we often get that with certain tea drinkers as well. Not because tea doesn't have a mechanism that that modulates caffeine release. It has to do with the quality of the tea that you're drinking. And often, you know, the people that wander into my tea room, we're drinking commodity tea bags that are, you know, cut up and have more surface area, and there's far more concentration, and it's lower quality, and there's less theanine, if any, left in those teas. And that's the magical mechanism with the tea plant, is that there's this trio of nutrients, there's theanine, there's the caffeine, and there's the polyphenolic compounds that work together synergistically to modulate that caffeine release. Tomas, did you know that about tea, that tea has this modulating effect to slow the caffeine release because of those, that trio of nutrients?

Tomas: I didn't focus on this kind of knowledge, but you know, logically, yes, because tea would have also some of those properties which we take from herbs, like regular tea, or whatever type of tea you use. So I never focus on this kind of aspect, but I agree, yeah, it might. I don't want to sound weird, but you know, nothing is 100% in the nature. We always say it was 99.99. But in Europe, we did little statistics. In Czech Republic, Slovakia, Italy, 100 people started to drink caffeine a year, 100 people stopped with their troubles drinking coffee. So we have those statistics, it's just because when I finished my calculation, and we introduced the product, I was thinking, okay, like 80-85% if you are very positive. But it goes to 99.9%. Probably I know from, you know, since 2005, and there are thousands and thousands of consumers of cafezia, we had probably one person who was working hard nights and have a coffee midnight, and after took her a little bit longer time to get sleep. When I have work in the evening, and I have to write something down or work on my stuff, I do a little French press, I have two cups of cafezia, I wash my face, go to bed, and I sleep. There is no influence. And that's what happened to 99.9%. You know, why cafezia, for example, is very popular in academic world, when students, academics, they have to work, they like, love to work all night or early morning, and after they get the support, they have to go to bed and sleep.

Kevin: Where were you when I was in university? I so could have used that. The number of sleepless nights I had after having a coffee late at night, and then forgetting, like, oh, no, I've just...

Tomas: Yeah, me too. That's the normal experience of people. They work hard and they say, okay, I have a cup of coffee because I'm... Right. And after you, four o'clock in the morning, you still find the... You regret it.

Kevin: Yeah, exactly. You go, I know why I'm tossing and turning now.

Tomas: Again, you repeat this mistake and again and again. Yes. Because it tastes so good.

Michelle: Now, Tomas, you mentioned the half-life, but what that would mean is that 50% of the caffeine remains in your bloodstream after that point of time, after those, that two and a half or four and a half hours or so, and that we know that timing of that dose is what matters the most, and that certain people may have a genetic impact based on whether they are, you know, slow metabolizers or fast metabolizers of caffeine. What have you, and Jenna can answer this too, what have you found from your customers or from, you know, prolonged exposures of, you know, community's experience that you've had with people experiencing your product with those people that are, you know, maybe the slow metabolizers that really seem to have a caffeine sensitivity? Have you met any of those and had any success at getting them to be able to find this product helps them?

Jenna: Yeah. I mean, we get messages every, every few days from people that this product has changed their life and it's reintroduced coffee to them. And when are we going to be in their favorite cafe? Because they are excited to have coffee with their friends again. And what's interesting that I love is because it's a good tasting coffee, some people just by chance, liked the packaging, picked up the coffee, just continued to drink it. Then as time went on, realize, Oh, there's herbs in it. What, why are the herbs there?

Kevin: What am I drinking?

Jenna: It's like, I can't believe the amount of people who, who don't look at ingredients, but I mean, I guess, right. They're not expecting that their coffee is going to have something in it. So I think that that's part of it. And they'll write me and they'll say, I didn't know that my anxiety was caused by the coffee. I was drinking until I was drinking your coffee. I ran out of it. I used what we'd had left of something else. And I went into full panic attack. And that was the only difference. So we get a lot of feedback from people who didn't actually notice the negative impact that their coffee was having on them, but when they made the switch to and then had something else, that's when those symptoms were so prominent and so stark that they realized, wow, I do have caffeine sensitivity. I don't enjoy these feelings. We've had a lot of, I mean, as I've gotten older, you know, my demographic of friends is a lot of women over 40. And the number of women who say this is, you know, this coffee is one of my best friends through perimenopause, through menopause. I'd love Tomas to speak a little bit about why that is, but it's a, it's a good friend. It's, you know, oftentimes coffee is this partner we have to work with because we think it's going to wake us up and give us joy. But then there's these, these side effects that, you know, are also conflicting, but it's just a true friend from the first sip to the last one. And it's so exciting to see how it's changing people's lives. Again, I don't know if Tomas will talk about this, but you know I've got some attention disorders and this coffee has, it regulates the way that my brain processes. I don't take medication. I'm not, you know, suggesting anything here, but it gives me what I need to stimulate my brain, but it doesn't over-activate my brain. And so I can go about my day with clarity and focus. And then I can also sleep. So we have people who reach out and this has been a coffee that's helped them with their ADHD, their focus issues. It's really incredible. I feel like I learn more about how great this product is every single month. And I just feel so lucky that we found it early on and that I can bring this to people and find out in so many ways how it benefits them.

Tomas: Yeah. So I, if I might, I will go back to Half-Life. You know, we go up to seven hours with people. They have some inflammatory disorders going on in the brain. I will mention classical inflammatory process like multiple sclerosis, which is highly prevalent in Canada as well, because those in Central Europe and all around. People, they have slow metabolic pathways of brain and those signaling pathways are really touched by caffeine and other stimulators. So it takes longer to tell caffeine, go away and don't bother my motor neurons, because I feel fatigued, I feel whatever. So, you know, two and a half hours, three hours, if you're both for healthy people, you finish your run, you have a coffee in three hours, two and a half hours, it's a half concentration caffeine getting weaker and it goes away. It's been a long, long year's discussion about neurodegenerative disorders and diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and coffee. Some people say, and some research proved that strong antioxidant activity clears up the radicals from bloodstream and lowers the impact of pathological signals in Parkinson's disease. You know, Parkinson's is basically motor disorders, so very strongly dopaminergic receptors and neurons are involved. And caffeine, it's mimicking dopamine, so there is a competition. So it might stimulate the relative receptors to recover motorically and don't have those strong symptoms. But again, we go to acidic portion of the coffee and acids in the coffee would influence in a negative way the disease. So again, you have something which can help, but it will hurt you as well. And again, in cafezia, we probably influence or we did influence two areas, acidity of coffee, so alkaloids of herbs, they will slightly enhance the pH of brewed coffee, which is a huge difference, pH 5.2 or 3. That's a huge difference for digestive tract in human body. And we played with caffeine and other aggressive compounds, stimulators in coffee to be nicer. So I'm just going back to, yes, do we feel herbs in cafezia? Straightforward, not really, but we feel better taste because secondarily, it moderates a little bit of final taste.

Michelle: Yeah. I love that you brought up Alzheimer's and Parkinson's because I did take a look and did a quick literature search to try find some of the newest research on coffee. And just in January 2025, I don't know if you happened to come across this one yet, there was a study that found consuming unsweetened and especially caffeinated coffee is linked to a 29% to 30% lower risk of Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases and a 43% reduction in mortality from these conditions. And notably that these associations were absent if people sweetened or artificially sweetened their coffee. Are the herbs adding any protective effect that wasn't already there? Because this study cites the caffeine alone, or is it really just complimentary in terms of how it changes the mechanism of how the caffeine is metabolized?

Tomas: There are two things, caffeine would stimulate the metabolic pathways in general. So it's a stimulant which activates your, again, it goes to the brain, but brain will ask large column, what do you think? And you have so many peptide hormones that are released immediately and help brain to accommodate. So first thing is that you stimulate metabolic pathways. When you stimulate metabolism, you deal with bad things as well. Elimination of free oxidative radicals, et cetera, et cetera. I am mentioning just free oxidative radicals, which is considered to be one of the causes of neurodegenerative diseases.

Michelle: We don't like free radicals, noobs, just so that you know, because free radicals are what cause our aging.

Tomas: Yeah, exactly. And skin changing and wrinkles and whatever, it's a multi-potent bad thing. But going back to caffeine and teaching how caffeine, how to be nicer, you have huge antioxidant potential in brewed coffee from natural alkaloids and other stuff in the coffee already. So when you affect caffeine metabolism, you enhance a bit with mixtures of herbs, these antioxidant properties of coffee. So the other hand, it may help a little bit to enhance elimination of free oxidative radicals. And lower the aspect to any type of neurodegenerative processes or inflammatory processes in your central nervous system.

Michelle: Once again, very, very similar to tea. And I was researching, what is the nutrition in the coffee? What is in this bean that makes it so similar to tea? And it's, again, the high number of polyphenolic compounds, the types of phytochemicals that have this protective effect. And then you've just basically enhanced that by adding other phytochemicals from three other herbs to synergistically add on to that, which I think is just amazing. And it was one thing interesting that I read was there are countries that have had coffee culture since the beginning of coffee drinking. Often in those cultures, the people were getting a majority of their exposures to those beneficial antioxidant compounds from the coffee more so than from their diet. And it's another similarity that we see with tea cultures. Tea growing countries traditionally aren't the richest of the countries. And similarly, it was the tea that was providing a majority of the polyphenols, of those antioxidant compounds, those protective compounds that are beneficial to immune system and human health and all of those other things were coming from the product. So I found that very interesting. So these parallels, I have to tell you, it was mind blowing when I was researching for this episode. I have sworn off coffee for 15 years. And I'll notice that you, Cafezia is Arabica. And I know that Jenna has been mentioning that to me for the last several years since we've been sharing her product with people. And of all of the coffee out there, it seems to me that there's two major types. Is that right, Tomas? There's Robusta and Arabica. And Arabica happens to be, you started with the friendlier of the bean to begin with.

Kevin: The friendlier bean.

Michelle: That it has a smoother, sweeter flavor and aroma and that it has a lower caffeine content than the Robusta beans. It's less bitter than the Robusta bean. So I went out last week to an Ethiopian restaurant with my sister and I messaged Kevin and I said, I'm drinking a coffee and he couldn't believe it. But it's also, I think Ethiopian beans are also Arabica beans. I think yours come from South America. Is that right?

Tomas: Yes. Yes. It comes from Peru mostly and Honduras.

Michelle: Yeah. So it was, it was quite a shock to my palate to put coffee back on it again, but a delight nonetheless. And a lot of the detrimental aspects of coffee that, you know, was really prevalent in the research 15 years ago when I, when I first kind of removed it from my diet. Some of that has been myth busted, but also I would say more so the light shone for me is that I had an unhealthy relationship with coffee. I was drinking way too much. The dose is way too high. I would have, you know, like a giant, like, I don't know, more than 16 ounce, maybe a 20, 20 ounce, about 8 to 12 times a day, depending upon how long my meeting day was when I was corporate. So that was problem. Number one problem. Number two is I think I was just drinking really poor quality coffee and, and, you know, so the same problems that we're faced with, with the tea industry. So I wanted to bring up the beans. Cause I wondered if, um, had you, when you started out on this journey, the origin story of Kefetzia, had you considered which bean when you were doing your research and came up with this product?

Tomas: Yes. We talk about this with Brian and I ask him, okay, Brian, if you do something original and new, because it's a completely new quality in coffee world, let's put the best beans. And he explained, I will not insult Robusta. Robusta is a, it could be great quality of Robusta. It's very strong caffeine. It's a very strong antioxidant potential, et cetera, et cetera. But generally Robusta is aggressive coffee, not only caffeine, but altogether. And some people, they don't appreciate the taste. It's, it's very rich in taste, but it's very like over being complex and it bothers people and it's tough to digest as well. So, uh, I asked Brian, what are the best beans you have on market? And he told me, you have to go with a hundred percent Arabica. But if you go in the lower C-level Arabica, this is this acidic coffee, like a hundred percent Arabica from lower attitudes. It's acidic. You have to go higher and higher in altitudes. So we go 1200, 1800 meters.

Michelle: You're blowing my mind right now. This is the same as tea.

Tomas: But we are in the world of herbs and the magic of nature. So absolutely. So, so, uh, uh, Brian explained me the history of heritage. There was a founder who went to South America and taste hundreds and hundreds of coffee, went through the plantings. He learned how to roast coffee, et cetera, et cetera. And what we use for, for cafeteria, what Jenna is using to produce her cafeteria is the best quality of Arabica beans for higher out from higher altitudes. So already coffee by itself, it's lower in acidity and it's sensorically extremely rich.

Kevin: I had a question. And I don't know who I'm asking this to. So I'm just going to ask it. I'm curious about the history of adding things to coffee, if either of you were aware, because other than like in the seventies, it was always chicory, like coffee with chicory. And I don't even know what that did. I think you just watered it down and did something. But is there a like culturally maybe in other cultures or way back, is there a history of adding things to the coffee bean before drinking it? Or is this like a reasonably new, um, concept?

Jenna: So as far as I know, chicory roots, dandelions, those were all a method to extend coffee or replace coffee during wartime when you couldn't access coffee. It was people who wanted that experience and flavor, but they couldn't afford it. Um, so that's kind of like, as far as I know, going back, I don't know if Tomas, if you have something other than that, but the category of, you know, coffees infused with things, coffees blended with things is, is relatively new. And how that presents itself is when I go to retailers and I explain this, they don't really know where to put us yet. They're still trying to figure out, is this a coffee product? Is this a wellness product? Is this, but now there's a category of, you know, wellness coffees, enhanced coffees. And it's, it's, it's very much emerging right now. Lots of different things are being put into coffees. Obviously we have the, uh, you know, French vanilla and the flavors. So I'd say, yeah, that's a little bit different.

Kevin: Yeah. Because I know cardamom and cardamom and cinnamon have long been, I think for centuries and maybe longer, but that's a, that's a flavor. And I'm, I'm thinking a little bit different in terms of this seems to be purely to adjust the chemistry of the coffee without impacting the flavor. And that's, I was wondering if, if that has a history.

Tomas: Uh, I know about cardamom, the history of adding to the coffee because it kind of this, uh, spice is used to, uh, accepting more, very hot weather. So it, it, it's been done. It was added to the coffee more South of Europe or, uh, or even, uh, Middle East, et cetera. Uh, from affecting coffee and enhance some of good things like antioxidant properties and other beneficial properties. There is on the market, uh, mushroom coffee, several types.

Kevin: Yeah.

Tomas: Uh, there are a few, few, uh, types of mushrooms they use to mix with coffee. Uh, I am not very big fan of it because, uh, you, again, you don't enhance something to the limits. Uh, you really, what we do and what we should do in personalized medicine and personal approach, we have to use the capacity of human body. We cannot overpush. So you will not, uh, put overdose of something in your body and yay, we help. No, you just show human body. There is a potential in you. There is a capacity and you have to do it. So little initiation and let human body accommodate and do it. Right. So yeah, we enhance a little bit of antioxidant properties of coffee. But if you add those crazy effective mushrooms for human metabolism, you will jump 10 times efficient. And this, uh, influences or the pathways, which are over activated and they may be some side.

Kevin: Okay. Okay. Interesting.

Michelle: Now I've got, I've got another science question for you, Tomas. One thing that comes up often, and I I've even had nutrition clients mentioned this to me that they have concerns about the cholesterol raising factors of coffee, which we know is kind of, um, according to the literature responsible for these little lipids called diterpenes that are in coffee and that they, they, they tend to, there tends to be mainly influenced by the brewing styles that if you use a paper filter, it catches some of it. They used to credit the paper filter for doing, catching all of it. But now they know that it's actually a lot of it is retained in the grounds. Um, so, you know, you can use a paper filter, but the grounds are contained in there and the, those diterpenes, those little lipids are not making it into the brew versus when you do, you know, you do a French press or Turkish coffee or something, you know, you end up with more of those diterpene residues in your brew. And it's, those are the, the little compounds that are causing, you know, the LDL cholesterol to raise. I'm just curious if brewing style will still be kind of the key for anybody that is concerned about that. It is that is, you know, on blood pressure, lowering medication, or they're concerned about their LDL or have you found, or do you happen to know with this combination of tasteless herbs, has it impacted that mechanism at all?

Tomas: Not at my knowledge that we limit the release of terpenes in coffee or other derivates of terpenes. But my, uh, at my, to my knowledge, we always drink fresh coffee, never brew coffee, let it sit more than one hour enough to drink it. It's an influence from environment which will modify those terpenes and hurt your body. So what I would say, the influence on liquid metabolism, freshly brewed coffee is very, really minimal. More it sits on the bench and you reheat, reheat like you, you know, sometimes you end gas station and they refresh your brew coffee. You ask them, Oh, six hours ago, that is a crime against humanity.

Kevin: Yeah.

Tomas: So I don't want to sound bad, but this is like, yeah, you know, so avoid making coffee. And after you go for some meeting and come back and still drink it is what three hours. No, it's not good. Uh, coffee is the diamond. You have to have respect for it. You do it. You enjoy next 15, 20 minutes. No five hours.

Kevin: Yeah. So I just want to ask a follow-up on that because cold brew is huge and cold brew, you leave it overnight. Is that a different, is the fact that you're not heating it a change or do you know, like, is that old?

Tomas: You know, temperature does a lot. So if you use like boiling water or 96 degrees or 188 Fahrenheit or whatever you extract very efficiently, everything, and you start to open the possibility of modification. When you do cold brew overnight, you just release a very slowly things. It's completely different in the world. Okay. To understand this world, check the solubility of caffeine in water at 25 degrees Celsius and 95 degrees Celsius. It's like ratio three times, 30 times different. Oh really? Yeah. Yeah. So, uh, in plants, in coffee beans, those things, they get why we roast coffee because you have those, those opening on the beans. And after the potential of releasing those things on coffee and the same is for tea, et cetera.

Michelle: I love the respect that you have, um, for this, for this plant and that, that real, I really connect to that so well. I just want to, I just want to like put this cholesterol issue to rest by acknowledging we have this, we run into the same problem with, with people with their tea concerns and their health is that they're often looking to the beverage, um, as, as the cause or the cure to all of their problems. When really the answers to that are in there, the full scope of their diet, right. And, and a coffee or a tea is neither going to cure you on its own or be the cause of harm on its own. If a person is struggling with cholesterol, there's likely other issues.

Tomas: Absolutely. If you don't mind what you eat, coffee will not be in hands all over your troubles. If you eat healthy, you move and you, because cholesterol is mainly food and stress food and stress. So what you eat, how much you eat. And after you have to move, you have to walk, you have to run, you have to, you cannot sit all day. That's the biggest inductors of hypercholesterolemia. So, uh, will we blame coffee for it or tea? No, it's a, you know, I would say yes. If you have like, I know people, they have 10 double espressos a day. Wow. So how much coffee it's too much. It's, it's basically it's a, you are on the, on the line of being intoxicated and there is a big impact. So this certainly will influence also fatty acids and triglycerides.

Michelle: A hundred percent. And my takeaway from what you just said is like, don't drink your coffee from a gas station. Same thing. I say, don't get your nutrition advice off of Tik TOK, right?

Tomas: So what I heard was we need to partner with gas stations.

Jenna: That's what I heard.

Kevin: But it's still going to be eight hours old.

Michelle: No, I don't, I don't think Jenna would allow that. She would be, she would be in there teaching, teaching a friendlier, more, more, more, more loving way to, you know, incorporate your, your coffee with your, with your gas pumping. So I would, you know, what a weird segue. Well, thank you both for bringing a coffee into the experience that matches my experience with tea. You've echoed what my experience was being introduced to tea in the tea growing regions. The original tea steepware does not actually steep the tea or pour the tea correctly. If you try to do it fast, if you try to do it fast, those, those original vessels spill, but you, you are forced to pour them very, very slowly in order to actually decant them correctly and without any spillage. And that in itself, even manufactured the teaware to try to teach us to slow down, to take a moment, to take a breath. There's a culture of, of, of smelling and observing what you see and taking a moment and then doing the same with the, with the steeped liquor and then tasting it very thoughtfully.

Kevin: And what we need, what we need, Michelle, based on, I just got an invention and Tomas, if you want to run with it, go for it. It's all yours. Just like the teapot that spills. If it's, uh, if you pour too quickly, we need gas station, coffee pots, if the coffee is too old, that's what we need. It just magically starts brewing itself a brand fresh new pot. If it's too old. Well, Tomas, Jenna, thank you so much. For joining us. This has been really, really eyeopening. It's amazing what you can do with coffee with just a very small number of herbs. That just blows my mind.

Michelle: I could honestly sit here for our rich role style podcast and just talk to you for three more hours, but we, we, none of us have that kind of time and our noobs.

Kevin: I don't know. We might start losing some of the noobs. Excellent. Well, thank you both. And, uh, now we're going to subject you. It is a tradition that we have a dad joke.

Michelle: Oh yes. I didn't warn you about that, Jenna. Sorry.

Kevin: Yes. So today, since we have two guests, guess how many dad jokes we're going to have.

Michelle: Okay.

Kevin: First one, what is fast, loud, and crunchy?

Michelle: I don't know, Kevin, what is fast, loud, and crunchy?

Kevin: A rocket chip.

Michelle: Oh no.

Kevin: I did mention there were dad jokes, right? You weren't actually expecting like good jokes. Good, good, good. Okay. The next one, number two, and then we'll let you go screaming from the building. Probably. My doctor told me I should try an all cashew diet. I said, but doc, that's just nuts.

Michelle: Coffee jokes, Kevin? Coffee is no joke.

Kevin: Well, so thank you. This has been very, very interesting. And we will add links to, uh, Cafezia on the, in the show notes. Uh, so for anyone who is interested and, uh, thank you for joining us. This has been very, very insightful and very interesting. Thank you very much.

Jenna: Thank you very much.

Kevin: So until next time, eat your greens and don't drink old gas station coffee.

Michelle: And I'll always be real. Everyone.

Kevin: You can subscribe to the podcast on whatever your favorite platform might be. Also, please consider leaving a review or telling your friends. That's the best way to spread the word. We'll see you next time with another interesting topic. The views and opinions expressed on nutrition for noobs are those of the hosts. It is not intended to be a substitute for medical, nutritional, or health advice. Listeners should seek a personal consultation with a qualified practitioner. If they have any concerns or before commencing any actions mentioned in the podcast.