Choose your coffee carefully...
A CUP of coffee a day can have surprising health benefits – but how you choose to drink it makes a massive difference.
While lattes contain iodine to boost thyroid function and fertility, a leading nutritionist has claimed that concentrated coffees, such as ristrettos, serve little purpose.
Ian Marber, one of the founders of The Food Doctor, told how essentially, it’s all about the ingredients of the coffee bean.
He explained: “The coffee bean is a good thing – a natural thing. It contains 500 plant components and lots of beneficial antioxidants, and has been the subject of hundreds of studies that show it can be beneficial in our diet.”
But Mr Marber said high street concoctions such as the ristretto – which is made with the same amount of coffee as an espresso but extracted with half the water – will have little health benefits.
“Generally, coffee can be helpful in terms of fluid intake and hydration, but not if you opt for this variety,” he said. Researchers at the University of Nottingham recently found that a regular caffeine intake helped fight obesity by stimulating the body’s calorieburning brown fat stores.
The Journal of Internal Medicine also reported that coffee can help stop gallstones developing.
And just last month, the European Journal of Epidemiology revealed that drinking two cups of coffee a day can increase life expectancy by up to two years.
Britons drink around 95 million cups of coffee a day, according to the British Coffee Association.