COFFEE & its Consequences: 3 science tips you need to know | Episode 7 of 18

just are you kidding me do we really need to add this into our milks seriously super [Music] frustrating hello angels and welcome to the glucose goddess show I'm jine SHP a biochemist obsessed with helping you understand your body and your health and today my dear coffee lovers we are discussing you guessed it or coffee coffee coffee coffee first things first coffee seems to be a generally healthy good for you drink as long as you don't overdo it so generally a cup of coffee a day seems pretty fine uh personally I've recently cut down on my

coffee consumption just because I'm super sensitive to it and if I have even one cup of coffee in the morning at 8:00 a.m. then I have a harder time falling asleep at night but that's just me personally if you're a coffee lover and you drink coffee again seems to be generally safe studies show us that people who regularly consume coffee have a reduced risk of developing type 2 diabetes and scientists think that this could be due to two different mechanisms of action the first interesting one is that in the liver coffee has been shown to

improve improve fat burning and lower the risk of naff non-alcoholic fatty liver disease which is incredibly common and second in the pancreas and this one I think is really interesting and cool coffee May reduce the stress of the mitochondria in your beta cells and your beta cells are the cells responsible for creating insulin so coffee may actually help them function more properly again this is a minor thing generally if you want to improve your health and your glucose levels and your insulin levels of course looking at Food first is going to be the solution but

this is quite cool as well however interestingly if you've ever worn a glucose monitor you might have seen something really interesting you might have seen that black coffee no sugar in it actually creates sometimes a small glucose Spike now this is a graph showing you me drinking coffee versus Allan drinking coffee as you can see in Allen it creates a bigger glucose Spike than in me so what does this actually mean well in some people coffee can actually increase your stress levels and your stress hormones a little bit and so your body may be releasing

extra glucose in your bloodstream as a response to this stress and stress is something that's very interesting personally I saw the biggest glucose Spike I had ever seen ever in my body after giving a presentation in front of a lot of people and having a big rush of stress I saw a massive massive massive Spike so your body can respond to a stressful situation or the perceived notion of stress by releasing some glucose into your bloodstream so if you're somebody that gets quite anxious when they drink coffee and maybe it makes you a little bit

jittery maybe you feel not great afterwards it could be causing a small glucose bike there's a really interesting study that I want to cover that completely blew my mind if you're somebody who drinks coffee in the morning and if you often wake up feeling a bit tired which I think most of us do well this recent study shows us that if you've just had a bad night's sleep and you want to make sure your glucose levels are as steady as possible for the rest of the day it is much better to drink your coffee after

eating breakfast than before eating breakfast the study is called glucose control upon waking is UN affected by hourly sleep fragmentation during the night but is impaired by morning caffeinated coffee and drinking your coffee after breakfast instead of before if you're tired and didn't have a good night's sleep can reduce the glucose bike of your breakfast by up to 50% and you know that if you have a big spike in the morning your whole day is going to be a glucose roller coaster so it's really important in the morning whenever you can to try to keep

your glucose levels as steady as possible so if this is something that's easy for you highly recommend it highly recommend trying it out and see how you feel oh and an important note about this study it also showed that your insulin spikes will be smaller if you drink your coffee after breakfast rather than before so it's not just a glucose Spike it's also the insulin response which is almost even more important than glucose alone I often get the question well what if I don't eat breakfast well in that case you can't really do this hack

so don't worry about it there's lots of other stuff that you can do to make sure your coffee doesn't spike your glucose levels let's talk about what you put in your coffee H so an espresso or black coffee like this generally is not going to spike your glucose levels smells so good uh so it's generally not going to spike your glucose levels but of course if you add sugar to your coffee that's going to create the glucose Spike sugar is made up of sucrose which is half glucose half fructose so every time you add sugar

to something ooh actually let me go get a little cube of sugar so I can demonstrate let's see this in closeup coffee sugar cube goes into the coffee now I don't have a spoon with me right now so this is going to feel a little bit um strange I'm just going to put the sugar in the coffee and then I'm not going to um mix it in so forgive me maybe I'll put it on the side here so we can kind of see it no we cannot see it okay the the the sugar has disappeared

in the coffee so when you do this you're adding all of these molecules of sucrose into your coffee and sucrose when we eat it or drink it then breaks down into glucose and fructose in our system so a coffee with sugar in it is going to create a glucose Spike because it's going to release glucose molecules as we digest it and especially if you have your coffee with sugar on an empty stomach in the morning that's going to create a big glucose bike because when we are fasted when there's nothing in our system anything we

drink or we eat is going to go really quickly to our bloodstream and create a really big spike so if you start your days with coffee and sugar big glucose Spike that's going to lead to Cravings fatigue hunger inflammation bigger risk for diabetes hormonal imbalances so that's really something to avoid if you can what can you do instead of sugar now ideally you'd want to slowly we yourself off of needing that sweet taste but good alternatives are things like M fruit or Stevia that you can put in your coffee you can also try cinnamon or

cocoa powder I know it sounds weird but it's super good if you sprinkle some on top and maybe that will give you the little hint of sweetness that you like without a big glucose bike hey really quickly if you can't always do my food hacks and you want to eat the carbs that you love with less impact on your glucose levels I created a capsule just for that it's called anti-spike formula you take two before a meal it cuts the gluc glucose Spike of carbs by up to 40% 100% made out of plants and tested

by over 25 clinical trials link is in the description okay back to the episode how about we cover milk I'm personally a big flat white fan you know cappuccinos or any of those delicious coffee and milk drinks so what's the deal with milk what happens when we add milk to our coffee the answer is it completely depends on what milk you're adding big oat milk oat milk craze right now um unfortunately and I know a lot of people are going to hate me for saying this but um oat milk is not a good option so

oat milk comes from oats and oats are a grain they're cereal right so oats like all grains and cereal are full of starch starch is essentially just long chains of glucose molecules attached together and when we digest starch they break down into individual glucose molecules make their way to our blood stream and Zoo creates a glucose Spike so when you add oat milk to your coffee you are essentially adding liquid starch you are adding just a bunch of glucose molecules and that creates a big spike so yeah oat milk is not the best option if

you really really really love it and you can't live without it there's a few things that you can do so first of all as I mentioned avoid it on an empty stomach anything on an empty stomach is going to lead to a bigger glucose Spike if it contains any glucose if you're a big oatmeal Clover having it after your breakfast instead of before not only is it going to help with what we saw earlier about the sleep deprivation impact but also because you'll already have food in your stomach all of the starch from the oats

are going to be slowed down through your system and the glucose molecules are going to arrive more slowly into your bloodstream creating a smaller glucose bikee now if you're ready to say goodbye to oat milk which I recommend there's other Alternatives out there that are not going to spike your glucose levels what you want is you want to look for either Dairy so regular cow's milk or nut milks so good options are things like almond milks pistachio milk coconut milk Macadamia milks because nuts are quite high in protein and fat so they're not just glucose

and when you drink a nut milk let's say almond milk you're not just getting a bunch of glucose like you are in an oats milk you're also getting some proteins and some fats and proteins and fats do not raise our glucose levels they keep our glucose levels steady now a very important thing to mention here if you go to a coffee shop and you ask for almond milk or any kind of nutmilk I kind of recommend you ask to see the box that it came in the bottle that it came in because if you have

a look in the ingredients you might actually see that there's added sugar in there so you might see the ingredients being like almonds and then cane sugar you really want to avoid that I had this thing uh recently where I saw this coffee shop was offering pistachio milk so I thought oo how cool pistachio milk I've never tried that before and then I asked to see the bottle and it was ingredients pistachio cane sugar just are you kidding me do we really need to add this into our milks seriously super frustrating so I then ended

up just switching back to asking for whole milk because whole milk is protein and fat very small amount of sugar naturally occurring not going to raise your glucose levels significantly so I went for whole milk which is generally the option that I choose but if you can ask to see the ingredients and if you're doing this at home just buy some unsweetened version of almond milk or coconut milk or any other nut milk that you're interested in other milks that are quite similar to oat milk because they also come from grains are rice milk barley

milk all of those kinds of milk are going to be 100% glucose because they're just starch and if this is sounding a little complicated like you can't keep track of which milks are good and which milks are bad I have a free recap one pager PDF Linked In the description of this episode that will give you a nice table with all the different types of milks and which one you should have which ones you should avoid but so generally unsweetened nut milk is going to be good try to avoid any milks that come from grain

or or just pure starch and then finally I find to be a very good option just to ask for some whole milk if you can handle Dairy well it's good source of protein good source of fat and is going to be a safer option in most cases if you're going to a coffee shop now here's a little graph showing you the difference between an oat Machel latte and a whole milk Machel latte big difference as you can see because oats milk again 100% starch turns to glucose big spike whole milk mostly protein and fat small

Spike so you feel better and the rest of your day is not dictated by a big glucose roller coaster that's going to make you have lots of cravings and be tired another cool difference to note is if you look at the glucose Spike of whole milk versus skim milk you can see that skim milk creates a bigger Spike than whole milk now why is that well because milk has some naturally occurring sugar called lactose and lactose breaks down to glucose as we digest it there's a little bit of it in there it's not nearly as

much glucose as you would find in some oat milk or rice milk which is why I prefer to have the dairy but skim milk takes away the fat in the milk and fat actually slows down glucose release in the body and prevents glucose spikes so whole milk has naturally occurring fat in it that's going to curb the spike of the milk but when you take the fat out there's less to curb the spike so the spike is bigger and another final study that's really interesting that I wanted to show um this is one showing that

the provence of the coffee beans also seems to have an impact on whether the coffee is going to create a spike in your body or not this study is called Differences and the effects of Kenyan Tanzanian and Ethiopian coffee intake on glucose levels measured with a freestyle liberate a pilot case study now this was a tiny tiny tiny study in one person but still got published and I think it's pretty interesting this one person in Japan found that the Kenyan coffee led to significantly smaller glucose spikes compared to the two other coffees the Tanzanian and

the Ethiopian now we can't really draw any conclusions from such a small study but this is something that might warrant some more research I think it's pretty interesting so to recap black coffee is fine for you avoid sugar add some Stevia cinnamon cocoa powder if you want some sweetness the milk you put in your coffee is super important try to avoid oat milk rice milk go for dairy go for regular cow's milk or unsweetened nut milks and finally if you're somebody who is tired in the morning generally try to have your coffee after your breakfast

and instead of before and that can help your glucose levels and that is all we have time for today thank you for being here I'll see you next [Music] time