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.
