I am one of “those People” who has never bought into the mythology surrounding organic goods as being the end-all, be-all of human health and wellbeing. The exhaustive studies published by Stanford University have more recently borne out my initial disdain for the fad craze of supposedly natural foods which it turns out are no better or worse than those produced by the standard methods.
So that being said, why would a guy like me refuse to drink any but Organic coffee? It’s based on a personal discovery that very nearly killed my wife some 6 years back in a freak incident that baffled Doctors for about a month until they uncovered the answer. Let me back up a bit here and start this from the beginning in order to allow you to appreciate the full impact:
My wife runs her own Bookkeeping business and while that in and of itself is not remarkable, (though she is indeed remarkable herself) anyone who has or does work in any accounting capacity knows that about this time of year, (late November) small businesses start getting frantic about their books and start finding someone to clean them up since they’ve been lying about forgotten most of the year and tax time is right around the corner. So having a thriving business, my wife finds herself working 12-15 hour days from now until about February, where she finishes up just before burning out into a pile of (metaphorical) ash from exhaustion. So her constant companion at the time was a Starbucks (I don’t speak Coffee and never will thank-you-very-much) large white chocolate mocha. In fact, it was doubly stressful since I worked days at a Vegas Casino and our second child was still sitting by her side in a bassinet. At least she had the devoted assistance of our 3 year old daughter to help out… (yes, she just rolled her eyes and groaned out loud at the memory) So, to sum up: Two kids, busy work (at home thankfully), more work piling on by the day leads her to suck down some 5-7 cups of Starbucks each day just to keep up. Not exactly the recommended lifestyle choices, but for a driven woman who wants a home life as well, it’s the cards that were on the table at the time.
So on comes the coffee; which she hates by the way… I know it sounds counter intuitive, but energy drinks were the exception, not the rule back then, so she dutifully downed her coffee and moved about her days keeping pace with life and work, when one day she noticed that her feet began to show signs of swelling. Ok, not that unusual we thought, so it did not alarm her overmuch until she began to get mood swings, and her stomach began to grow, and she began to get sick in the mornings. OK, yes we thought exactly what you are thinking now. A month of this and her stomach had grown even larger and solid as a rock. Now I’m not always as astute a husband as I could be, so I thought this would be the perfect time to make pregnancy jokes; which I soon found out was not the wisest of choices; Boy was she ever angry with me, especially since she had decided after our second child that she would not go through that again: Ever. A few household items even hit the wall a time or too…
The Doctors could not identify what was happening to her and could not explain her condition, especially after my wife explained to them that she had panicked and bought twelve pregnancy tests and all of them said she was not pregnant. They went through blood tests and other tests over the next 4-5 weeks until finally one of the tests came back with an answer. Coffee.
The coffee she was drinking so avidly was the cause of her false pregnancy signs. It had caused all of her internal organs to retain massive amounts of water and were on the verge of shutting down completely because of it. I can’t even begin to imagine how large they must have grown to send her belly out to 7-months pregnant size, but taking her precious coffee away for good did the trick and over the next three weeks, everything went back down to normal.
So why coffee? Well, it turns out that Starbucks, (and nearly all other brands by the way) gets their coffee from producers that use a shortcut during the roasting process: They spray a chemical compound very similar in composition to insecticides onto their coffee beans in order to speed up the roasting process and no, they can’t ever wash it out because it bakes into the beans themselves during the roasting process for all of us to enjoy. It was a high concentration of that particular poison that had affected my wife’s health in such a dramatic fashion, and by simply switching to an organic coffee, all of those symptoms went away quite rapidly. I’m sure you can understand why, since that day, I have never bought another cup of non-organic coffee, nor will I any time soon, because as long as it is financially beneficial to them, coffee growers will continue to poison their coffee as long as they can to save a few days and squeeze in one more batch of beans for the season.
Just my view from the cheep seats…
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