Natural Medicine
People all over the world love coffee. Coffee bars have sprung up in even the most remote of towns, to cater to the very enjoyable social aspect of coffee drinking.
So long as you do not indulge in more than a few cups of coffee per day, the general consensus is that coffee does no harm providing that your general health is good.
(note:: this post first appeared on ‘Nutritional Tips’, which my son and I began together. We have decided to put the posts from that website onto this one, since this has more readers)
Moderate coffee drinking may even be benefitting your health in several ways.
Coffee Can Increase Brain Power: Coffee is well-known as a brain stimulant, and recent research suggests it may even make you more intelligent by opening up unused pathways of the brain. However, beware – if you drink too much coffee, the brain can get fagged, which will not help your memory.
Coffee Acts As A Digestive: Coffee helps stimulate bile production, which makes it a helpful aid to digestion after eating a rich meal. Roasted coffee beans contain the vitamin niacin, and one cup of brewed or percolated coffee is supposed to give around 1 mg of niacin.
Coffee Grounds For A Skin Tonic: Ground coffee can be used as a defoliant for the skin. The used, moist grounds can be rubbed onto the skin, which helps to shed old skin tissue and improve the circulation. John Heinerman says this treatment was popular in Japan at the time of writing his book in 1998.
Coffee As A Cancer Treatment: Coffee enemas were famously popularized by Dr Max Gerson, who used them as part of his cancer therapy, with very good results.
Coffee enemas work very effectively to release toxins from the liver, and to remove long-standing toxic congestion in pockets of the bowel. I
Coffee May Help Prevent Colon Cancer: It was previously thought that coffee drinking could lead to the development of certain cancers, such as pancreatic cancer. (see John Heinerman, p.178) But recent research has indicated that people who drink a few cups of coffee per day have less risk of bowel cancer than those people who do not drink any coffee. (see Reader’s Digest, Tom Sanders,
The benefit of coffee to the bowel is partly because it has a laxative, cleansing effect. But it is also because coffee has the power to neutralize some toxins: Coffee as a medicine was well known in the ancient world as an antidote for certain types of mild poisoning. The Egyptians were supposed to have used coffee to treat some forms of food poisoning.
Best to avoid coffee if you suffer migraines, as the caffeine in coffee can be a trigger.
Addiction to Coffee: Coffee is addictive, so one needs to be mindful of the quantities drunk in a day.
Hypoglycaemia: Be cautious in your coffee-drinking if you have hypoglycaemia, as coffee can disturb blood-sugar levels. If you suffer hypoglycaemia, then you should never take coffee on an empty stomach, if at all.
Osteoporosis: It is generally recommended that middle-aged women avoid excessive coffee-drinking, as it could lead to osteoporosis at this time of life. This is because coffee can interfere with calcium absorption. Anything over three cups a day could be undermining your health.
Heart Attacks, Strokes, High Cholesterol: Brewed coffee increases the heart rate and raises the blood pressure slightly. For this reason, most health writers advise the avoidance of coffee if you are susceptible to strokes, or heart attacks, or high blood pressure, but not all writers prohibit coffee entirely under these circumstances.
Filtered Or Instant Coffee Is Less Harmful: It has been found that the method of producing your cup of coffee will decide the effect on your blood cholesterol. Drinking plain, brewed or boiled coffee is not advisable, as there are two chemicals found in coffee beans, cafestol and kahweol, which can raise blood cholesterol. However, these harmful chemicals are removed in the process of making instant coffee, and they are also removed when a filter is used in making percolated or brewed coffee.
So people with mild cholesterol problems may find one or two cups of filtered or instant coffee will be tolerable. Ask your doctor.
For The Organic Garden: Coffee is a rich fertilizer and is wonderful for the plants in the garden. It also helps keep the bugs away. Just water down any coffee grounds you have, and sprinkle a bit of the mixture around several plants. Note: I have discovered that orchids hate coffee fertilizer so much that they perish. So do not put it anywhere near your orchids.