Is Organic Coffee Toxin Free?

We live in a world where they keep adding more and more things to our food and drink. Are things like high fructose corn syrup or monosodium glutamate good for you? How about the residues of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, or antibiotics? What toxins are the lurking about that you don’t know about? How do you avoid eating and drinking things that are not especially good for you? Is organic coffee toxin free? That brings us to healthy organic coffee.

Start the day with a hot cup of healthy organic coffee and you can receive a number of health benefits. Healthy organic coffee contains calcium. It contains antioxidants such as polyphenols which are also called condensed tannins and help prevent tooth decay in addition to their antioxidant activity. The antioxidant properties of a healthy cup of organic coffee include the ability to lessen age associated cellular damage, prevent new blood vessel formation in cancerous tissue, and inhibit the long term inflammation seen in atherosclerosis. Ongoing research points to uses of polyphenols as treatments for specific age related conditions. And all of this from a cup of healthy organic coffee!

And you get all of this in a cup of organic coffee without the toxins and other contaminants too often found in our food and even in regular coffee.

A study by the Australian Food Standards Authority revealed that as many as 133 contaminants may be in a cup of commercially available coffee. These contaminants include metals such as aluminum and zinc, pesticide residues, ochratoxin A, acrylamide, furan, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Some polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are found to cause cancer. Furans have been associated with skin disorders, liver problems, certain kinds of cancers, impairment to the reproductive, endocrine, and immune system, as well as effects on embryonic development.

How do we know that a cup organic coffee is toxin and contaminate free?

Organic Coffee Certification

Since you probably don’t live in a place like the Colombian Eje Cafetero where coffee grows in everywhere including back yards you can’t know personally if you coffee is toxin free. But you can rely on organic coffee certification.

Organic coffee differs from regular coffee in several aspects. The soil in which organic coffee is grown must have been verified as free from prohibited substances for at least three years. In addition there must be distinct boundaries between land on which organic coffee is grown and land where pesticides, herbicides, and prohibited chemical fertilizers are used. This guarantees that drift of substances sprayed or otherwise applied on adjacent land will not contaminate the organic plot of land. Organic coffee certification includes the adherence to a specific and verifiable plan for all practices and procedures from planting to crop maintenance, to harvest, de-husking, bagging, transport, roasting, packaging, and final transport. Along the way procedures must be in place at every step to insure that there is no contamination of the healthy organic coffee produced in pristine soil with regular coffee produced on soil exposed to herbicides, pesticides, and organic fertilizers.

The gold standard for certification in North America is the USDA (United States Department of Agriculture). The USDA directly certifies coffee grown on US soil, namely in Hawaii. In Central and South America the USDA uses the services of agencies such as Bio Latina to walk the mountains from Mexico to Peru and Colombia to Brazil testing soil, coffee and farming practices to guarantee that your certified organic coffee is toxin and contaminant free. Besides USDA certification, look for UTZ and Rainforest Alliance.




Leave a Reply