The fact is that liquid is an incredibly fast method for delivering a lot of nutrients to your system – or a lot of problems, depending on what you drink!
If you’re trying to lose weight and/or burn body fat, should you drink, coffee or tea? And if tea, which type of tea – white, black or green?
The answer is – you should drink both, apparently, a couple of times a day!
Here’s the low down on why you should drink Coffee.
A study published in the Nutrition journal found that light to moderate coffee drinkers (1-4 cups per day) had the lowest amounts of visceral fat compared to non-coffee drinkers and heavy coffee drinkers. Obviously they adjusted for other lifestyle factors like exercise, alcohol, and smoking. So, a couple of cups of coffee a day are good for your waistline.
How does it work?
There are 2 benefits: fat loss and reduced inflammation.
Fat loss
Compounds in coffee have influences on certain hormones. Adiponectin ejects body fat from the belly fat region (viscera) and moves it towards the subcutaneous fat region. Caffeine in coffee can increase our metabolic rate by 3 to 11 percent, and most of the increase is caused by an increase in the burning of fat! It works, sort of like exercise, in that it triggers the release of catecholamines (including adrenaline) that spark the release of stored fat to be
used for fuel. Also, coffee nudges neutral fat cells into the fat-burning side.
Reduced Inflammation
Researchers at Harvard Medical School discovered that test subjects who regularly drink coffee have lower levels of inflammatory biomarkers and deduced that the caffeine in coffee is able to defend the body against age-related inflammation by suppressing genes related to inflammation.
How much and what type of coffee?
Drinking a couple of cups of coffee a day will help you live longer and more healthfully. More than that, and it has the opposite effect and down-regulates the communication between adrenaline and the fat cells, with diminishing returns in the benefits.
The disparity and downsides in coffee benefits is also largely related to the quality of the coffee, as well as the low quality ingredients that are commonly added to people’s cup of coffee: highly processed sugar, coffee ‘creamers’ and/or milk or cream from grain-fed cows. Hot, fresh brewed organic coffee is best. Nut milks or coconut oil or butter, or grass-fed butter are better than milk or cream.
So, drink a couple of cups of good quality coffee a day and enjoy a longer, slimmer, healthier life with less aches and pains. What’s not to like?! Next time we will discuss the incredible fat burning properties of tea!
