Dr. John McDougall on Coffee
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- Created on Saturday, 05 February 2022 13:01
His video is worth watching because Dr. McDougall made some interesting points about coffee. But first, I have to make a disclaimer. Dr. McDougall is a radical low-fat advocate. Even raw nuts and seeds and avocadoes, he treats like poison. That may be a little exaggerated, but he’s got a bad attitude towards them, for sure. He argues that because peasant societies all over the world eat starch-based diets (and he exaggerates the extent that they do) that Man is a starch eater.
But, when people started to rely on agriculture, they needed crops that could provide food within one growing season. It may take 8 years for a pecan tree to start producing- and that’s if you plant a tree. If you just plant a pecan, it may take 10 years- or more.
I’m not against eating starches, and I eat them. But, I still think of them as makeshift foods, and especially grains, which are grass seeds. The fact is that humans are highly sensitized to and drawn to eating fats. When some primordial man came upon a pistachio tree for the first time, he probably thought he died and went to Heaven. And I guarantee you he ate those nuts with no concern about fat being bad.
And how can fat be bad when human breast milk has more fat than cow’s milk? So, the whole idea that “Starch: good/Fat: bad” is nonsense to me.
Dr. McDougall is mostly wary of coffee, although it sounds like he does drink it some. He talked about it waking you up in the morning and getting you thinking clearly, but that’s bull shit. You shouldn’t need it. Kids don’t need it, so why should you? I don’t need it.
But, he talked about the excess acid production from it and the stimulant effect. He mentioned the tremors. He should have also mentioned that coffee can cause cardiac arrythmias. I’ve seen that more than a few times. I drank coffee some back in college, but I haven’t drunk it since then.
He scoffed at the idea that coffee helps prevent cancer and heart disease. He said people love to hear good things about their bad habits, which is true. He could have mentioned that it’s supposed to be due to the antioxidants that coffee is high in. But, all legumes are high in antioxidants, and you can just eat them. You don’t need to drink coffee.
Dr. Bruce Ames, who was the head of Biochemistry at Berkeley, who is still alive at the age of 93, has pointed out that coffee is burnt; it is charred; which means that it has toxic hydrocarbons, the-products of burning, which are, in fact, carcinogenic.
Dr. McDougall said that coffee raises cholesterol, but if it’s made with a paper filter, it does so less. He should have pointed out that coffee raises blood sugar. It stimulates the liver to release glucose through gluconeogenesis. And that makes sense because it’s like adrenaline, and adrenaline does that. I’m not referring to the sugar people add to coffee, which is more yet.
I think of caffeine as the kid brother of cocaine. You may know that in South America, they chew on coca leaves to get a buzz, and it’s not as bad as taking refined cocaine. It’s probably not as bad as drinking coffee.
But, the bottom line for me is that Herbert Shelton was right, that stimulants do not provide or increase energy, they just cause you to expend it. You can’t actually increase your energy by drinking coffee. If you are tired and you drink coffee, it’s going to make you more tired- in the long run. Temporarily, you may get a lift from it, but it’s phony. As soon as that short-term effect wears off, you’re going to feel more tired than ever. And that’s the real and lasting effect.
So, it’s a bad road to go down. I’ve known a lot of people who can’t function in the morning without coffee. They literally can’t do a damn thing until they get some coffee into themselves. And that is a dire state to be in.
So, I don’t drink coffee, and I urge people to get the hell off of it. But, here is Dr. McDougall’s video about it.