Make Your Coffee Heart-Healthier!

Today’s almonds have been activated by:

⏰ IN A RUSH?

Today’s 30-Second Summary

If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:

• Coffee has many health benefits, but a compound in it, cafestol, is known to raise LDL (“bad” cholesterol).

  • Different methods of coffee-making produce different levels of in-drink cafestol, so if that’s a concern for you, you can choose accordingly!

• If you enjoy the condensed daily dose of digestible health information from 10almonds, you might well like today’s sponsor 1and1, too.

  • This (free!) newsletter's goal is to help you get 1% better every week and build positive wellness habits that stick. They also cover finances, relationships, and more.

Read on to learn about these things and more…

👀 WATCH AND LEARN

Live longer by getting up off of the floor without using your hands (6:40)

The ability to get up off of the floor without using your hands is considered to be one indicator of a lower biological age.

Here are some exercises to acquire (if you haven't already) and maintain that ability:

Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!

Getting-up menu:

• 1:30 | Squats

• 2:55 | Hit switches

• 4:00 | Hip mobility

Want to watch it, but not right now? Bookmark it for later 🔖

☕ MAIN FEATURE

Health-Hack Your Coffee

We have previously written about the general health considerations (benefits and potential problems) of coffee:

The Bitter Truth About Coffee (or is it?)

Today, we will broadly assume that you are drinking coffee (in general, not necessarily right now, though if you are, same!) and would like to continue to do so. We also assume you’d like to do so as healthily as possible.

Not all coffees are created equal

If you order a coffee in France or Italy without specifying what kind, the coffee you receive will be short, dark, and handsome and without sugar. Healthwise, this is not a bad starting point. However…

• It will usually be espresso

• Or it may be what in N. America is called a French press (in Europe it’s just called a cafetière)

Both of these kinds of coffee mean that cafestol, a compound found in the oily part of coffee and which is known to raise LDL (“bad” cholesterol"), stays in the drink.

Read: Cafestol and Kahweol: A Review on Their Bioactivities and Pharmacological Properties

Also: Cafestol extraction yield from different coffee brew mechanisms

If you’re reading that second one and wondering what a mocha pot or a Turkish coffee is, they are these things:

• Mocha pot: a stovetop device used for making espresso without an espresso machine

• Turkish coffee pot: also a stovetop device; this thing makes some of the strongest coffee you have ever encountered. Turks usually add sugar (this writer doesn’t; but my taste in coffee been described as “coffee like a punch in the face”)

So, wonderful as they are for those of us who love strong coffee, they also produce the highest in-drink levels of cafestol. If you’d like to cut the cafestol (for example, if you are keeping an eye on your LDL), we recommend…

The humble filter coffee

Whether by your favorite filter coffee machine or a pour-over low-tech coffee setup of the kind you could use even without an electricity supply, the filter keeps more than just the coffee grinds out; it keeps the cafestol out too; most of it, anyway, depending on what kind of filter you use, and the grind of the coffee:

Physical characteristics of the paper filter and low cafestol content filter coffee brews

What about instant coffee?

It has very little cafestol in it. It’s up to you whether that’s sufficient reason to choose it over any other form of coffee (this coffee-lover could never)

Want to make any coffee healthier?

This one isn’t about the cafestol, but…

If you take l-theanine (see here for our previous main feature about l-theanine), the l-theanine acts as a moderator and modulator of the caffeine, amongst other benefits:

The Cognitive-Enhancing Outcomes of Caffeine and L-theanine: A Systematic Review

As to where to get that, we don’t sell it, but here’s an example product on Amazon 😎

Enjoy!

❤️ OUR SPONSORS MAKE THIS PUBLICATION POSSIBLE

Get 1% better, every week

If you enjoy the condensed daily dose of digestible health information from 10almonds, you might well like 1and1, too.

This (free!) newsletter's goal is to help you get 1% better weekly and build positive wellness habits that stick. They also cover finances, relationships, and more.

Unlike 10almonds, they put out new editions a couple of times per week, but there’s plenty of practical content in those, to make it very much worthwhile.

After all, gradual habitual improvement gives compound interest over time!

You can opt in here:

Please do visit our sponsors—they help keep 10almonds free

🌍 AROUND THE WEB

What’s happening in the health world…

• Reducing poverty may reduce risk of developing dementia

• Poor night's sleep can trigger atrial fibrillation the next day

• Parkinson's research: new hope when treatment options seem exhausted

• Frailty status in older adults associated with more adverse events after surgery

• Understanding that chronic back pain originates from within the brain could lead to quicker recovery, study finds

• Advanced treatments target advanced shoulder issues

• Potential inheritable effects and ethical considerations of epigenome editing

More to come tomorrow!

📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW

Makkō-Hō: Five Minutes' Physical Fitness - by Haruka Nagai

We've all heard the claims, "Fluent in 3 Months!", "Russian in Two Weeks!", "Overnight Mandarin Chinese", "15-Minute Arabic!", "Instant Italian!".

We see the same in the world of health and fitness too. So how does this one's claim of "five minutes' physical fitness" hold up?

Well, it is 5 minutes per day. And indeed, the author writes:

The exercises themselves are from makkō-hō, which is a kind of Japanese dynamic yoga. They involve repetitions of (mostly) moving stretches with good form, and are excellent for mobility and general health, keeping us supple and robust as we get older.

The text descriptions are clear, as are the diagrams and photos. The language is a little dated, as this book was written in the 1970s, but the techniques themselves are timeless.

Bottom line: consider it a 5-minute anti-aging regimen. And, as Nagai says, "the person who cannot find 5 minutes out of 24 hours, was never truly interested in their health".

Click here to check out Makkō-Hō and schedule your five minutes!

Wishing you a healthy, peaceful weekend,

The 10almonds Team