Paul fesses up to that occasional double espresso. I’ve got a strong appetite for that kind of thing, although my weakness is for soy lattes. The problem is, I can’t drink much of it because of my cholesterol levels. Contrary to what a lot of people think, it’s not the caffeine that causes the problem, and it’s apparently isolated to coffee that’s made without a paper filter. From Consumer Reports:
…lab tests, mainly from Europe, found that regularly drinking very strong coffee could sharply increase volunteers’ cholesterol levels. Researchers even isolated a fatlike chemical in coffee, cafestol, that was clearly responsible for the rise. (Cafestol shows up in coffee whether or not it’s decaffeinated.)
However, the brewing methods used in the lab studies involved boiling ground coffee in water, a method that produces extremely high concentrations of cafestol. By contrast, the filter and percolation brewing methods used by more than nine of ten Americans remove all but a trace of cafestol. (So-called French-press brewing results in a cafestol content close to that of the boiling method.)
When Joan and I first got together, I had just broken my coffee maker, so I used her french press. It was a couple of months later that I got my first cholesterol test; my total cholesterol was close to 300. My doctor gave me a couple months to sort out my diet, but I didn’t make any major changes, except for one. And I had no clue what I had done: I got a coffee maker as a gift from my in-laws, and went back to brewing with a paper filter. The next test, my cholesterol was down by about 40 points. It was a few months later that I learned about cafestol.
I’m not trying to put Starbucks out of business here, but if you have trouble with your cholesterol, you probably want to drink a little more drip coffee than you do espresso or anything else made without a paper filter. And if you’re my age (mid 30s) or older, and haven’t got your cholesterol tested, please do, especially if you have a family history of that sort of thing.