Coffee and Health; response to Chris Kresser's very interesting article

Hi Chris, I really appreciate this piece http://chriskresser.com/all-about-coffee on Coffee consumption and health… not that I disappreciate any of your other pieces. At the moment I’m experiencing a strange hypotension and forced myself to read…

I live in Mexico with my wife Margarita. My father-in-law is both an organic and conventional coffee producer in the mountains of Veracruz. Margarita, a few of my 11 brother and sister in laws, and I travel around the country with a coffee bar in search of a better coffee market for my father-in-law etc… During the 12 years Margarita and I are together, I’ve seen my coffee consumption decrease greatly (and yes, it has much to do with issues of stress and health and much of what you mentioned about the personal state of the person) since I fell in-love with coffee in Puerto Rico and New York City in the 90s…

I’m frequently asked by customers if coffee is bad for you… I generally responded that it is a diarrhetic and that the person must be aware of how much water they are drinking before and after drinking coffee and how much coffee they are drinking, that the caffeine will function as a leaching away of water soluable vitamins and minerals… Then, not long ago, studies came out about coffee high in anti-Oxidents. But, in my studies, I realized that most of the anti-oxidents in coffee are in the flesh of the “coffee cherry” that is discarded in the process of removing the seed (bean)… Years ago my sister and brother-in-law started a business extracting the antioxidents from the discarded flesh of the coffee cherry and invited me to participate in the grassroots part of the process with my in-laws. But, one of their partners took off with the machinery forcing my sister and brother-in-law to file for bankruptcy, ending that project before it started with me… Here in Mexico Nestle ran away with the idea that coffee is an anti-oxidant, promoting their vast line of Nescafes as good pro-health, leaving me (us) with a horribly bad “taste” in our minds connected with the idea that coffee is an anti-oxidant. So, when clients mention anti-oxidants, I respond that it is a big fat lie… We sell wonderful coffee and are trying to help a community “pull itself up from its bootstraps” and we don’t believe in gain by manipulation and lying… As long as coffee doesn’t harm the consumer, that’s fine for us. Granted, if there is a whole slew of new information showing that the actually coffee bean is high in anti-oxidants not destroyed by the roasting process, then that it great too!

A few years ago I read a Canadian study of female coffee drinkers and diabetes that showed the women who consume 6 cups or more of coffee per day have inverse rates of diabetes… I tell my clients about that study. However, my mother-in-law who was born in the cafetal/finca/coffee plantation and who drank coffee all day long instead of water (since the water in Mexico, even in the mountains, tends to be contaminated) was diagnosed with Type II Diabetes. Then again, she gave birth to 13 babies (one died in the first week) which I am certain took a toll on her body… Plus, she lives in a horribly sexist culture where the men believe that the women should eat after the men have eaten (what is left over) even if the women are pregnant… A ton of desnutrition/malnutrition in the coffee ranches; children who grow up with distinct neurological problems/deformaties… that I imagine began in vitro… And lastly, the coffee that my mother-in-law always prepared for the family I called “coffee-tea”… very lightly concentrated light roast coffee that you can drink all day long… and that coffee-tea drunk all day long, like water, she also prepared with a lot of sugar…

There’s something I wish you and your readers and your (and my) fellow country people (“Americans”) would understand about coffee producers when thinking about organic coffee… When I first met Margarita in 2003, her father’s 5 hectares of coffee plants was 100% organic. Years earlier, representatives of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters (#2 buyer of coffee after Starbucks) had visited the community inspiring the coffee growers to convert to organic with the incentive of earning more money and creating stable family economies… Then, suddenly, Green Mountain left Veracruz and didn’t respond to my letters asking about their program, that they mention on their website…talking about Huatusco, Veracruz as one of the projects aiding family farmers… But, that’s clearly not true. And, no, this is not about Green Mountain, but about cultivating organic coffee and who actually gains… If you cultivate organic for a sustainable income in Mexico, you must have a lot of land, since organic coffee produces much less crop than does conventional. Granted, conventional agriculture leaches the soil of its nutrients, requiring a lot of land for rotating the crops… In Mexico, organic toasted coffee does not receive a higher price. So, if you are a small coffee farmer struggling to “pay the bills”, it is much more logical to cultivate conventional coffee… And if you sell unprocessed organic coffee cherries to the middle men who were actually working closely with Green Mountain, “they” were paying you 5 cents more por kilo for that organic coffee… Lets say that they paid you 50 cents per kilo for conventional coffee cherries, meaning that you were being given a 10% increase, although your organic coffee farm produces at least 50% less per year than conventional coffee… So, the appearance of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, while appearing to be helping the farmer was actually sending them further into poverty… Later on I bumped into a woman who worked in Green Mountain’s publicity department and told her about my in-laws’ ranch and the Green Mountain project there and that they just disappeared… And she told me that Green Mountain only works within countries that guarrantee Fair Prices for the farmers… which explains much about why they suddenly disappeared from Mexico. But, this does not justify Green Mountain’s publicity of their project with my inlaws’ community when, truthfully, the benefit is not seen.

It would be wonderful to find giant organic markets here in the Garden of Eden of Mexico. Truthfully, it is virtually non-existent. Most organic products to be found in Mexico are from the Costco stores and extremely doubtable… It’s wonderful that you the health conscious readers can maintain a 100% organic diet. But, I truly believe that you have no idea just how difficult it is for a farmer, especially organic farmer, to subsist. In Mexico, a pound of conventional coffee sells at $5 USD at the high end, no matter the quality… That’s the price we are selling my father-in-law’s coffee. When I met Margarita 12 years ago, my father-in-law’s anual crop (December-March is the harvest period) 100% organic sold to the middle-man buyer earned him gross $1,500 USD. In order to help the family economy, various of my brothers-in-law worked on construction sites in Mexico City earning the equivalent of $120 USD per week… (This was 2003-2007 in a country that resides in the top 8% of the world’s wealthiest countries). This past year we returned to my father-in-law the equivalent of $8,500 USD for roasted coffee much higher prices than the typical buyer of roasted coffee would pay… and we have 3 of my brothers-in-law working with us 4 months per year at a total pay of $13,461 USD that also includes room, board, transportation, health insurance. We pay my father-in-law in advance for coffee we will use in the future… If you do the math, comparing these earnings with those in the U.S., you will understand why so many Mexicans enter the U.S. “illegally”… And why so many “American” manufacturers put their plants in Mexico… The Swine Flu of 2009 began in the state of Veracruz in the region of the giant Smithfield Foods Pork processing plants (Smithfield Foods is the #1 pork producer and processor in the U.S.) But why must they exist in Mexico? because minimum wage is $5 USD/day and they can break environmental and health laws without legal repercussions…? In the last 6 years, the # of the world’s millionaires decreased a little less than 1% while the # of Mexico’s Millionaires increased 30% But that increased wealth does not filter down in the least bit to those doing the difficult work… Instead, since NAFTA in 1994, there has been an incredible phenomena of Mexican farmers selling their land so that their sons can pay the “coyotes” fees for entering the U.S. “illegally”… I put the word in quotations because the movement of poor mexican farmers to the U.S. was also part of the North American Fair Trade Agreement… but only read between the lines…

Coffee… a great thing for the consumer who can encounter high quality coffee like what my father-in-law produces and what we sell… A bad thing if cultivating it is your main economic option. What would you, the reader, do if you coffee prices doubled because the 70+ coffee cultivating countries decided to offer the coffee farmer a fair price?

You may be thinking that this is a different discussion. But, it really isn’t. I’m reading Chris’s wonderful pieces on health and diet and translating it to my wife, in-laws and friends. But, health, diet and economy can NOT be separated… As you all should know, the international epidemic of obesity/metabolic disorder no longer is about “diseases of affluence” but about “affordable” food… and refined carbs are much less expensive today than true whole grain breads, true brown rice and healthier grains, such as quinoa. My specialty is international cuisine and I would love to offer wheatless, soyless, cornless baked goods etc. But, no one in Mexico would pay the cost for those products; quinoa flour costs 10 times that of processed wheat flour… During the 12 years I’ve been living in Mexico, the value of the Mexican Peso against the U.S. Dollar has gone from 10 pesos/dollar to 16 pesos per dollar… Since much of what is sold in Mexico is imported from the U.S., that means that the price of goods has increased minimally 40%. At the same time, minimum wage here has increased possibly 5% and the state and federal declared price of a kilo of coffee cherries remains the same (increasing when there is a drout or a plague, due to scarecity and immediately decreasing the following year when the plantations have returned to health). Since the farmers aren’t generally well educated (horrible rural school systems), they don’t understand about economics and real value of the Peso or true costs of living etc… But, they do understand that the value of their land increases greatly sold for sending their sons to the U.S. to work, instead of producing coffee or tomatoes or sugar cane…