I recently heard about green coffee. I forget the details (I might have been half-asleep in bed as I heard it). But I vaguely recall someone was touting the health benefits of it.
I encountered green coffee beans in a Starbucks once. I grabbed one of the beans and smelled it. It smells disgusting. Kind of like dirt, IIRC. But dirt that has something really wrong with it, if you know what I mean. Trust me.
I guess I have just 3 questions then: (1) What does it taste like? (2) Where can you get it (now)? And (3) What (alleged?) health benefits does it have?
I have no idea what my brain is trying to reference for me, but it insists on imagining those smelly beans as being harvested from the scat of the animals that digested it.
:eek:
p.s. My brain really needs a new filing system.
At the very least, a thorough defrag.
Green coffee beans are just the unroasted beans. All coffee starts that way. You can roast them at home, it’s not hard and a good way to get fresh roasted coffee.
I’ve never heard of green coffee as a drink, nor of anyone consuming green beans without roasting them first. Are you sure that’s a thing?
Taomist is thinking of Kopi Luwak, which is another thing entirely.
As I said, I may have been half-asleep. But I am quite sure that is what I heard: green coffee as a beverage. The only thing I am unsure of is the alleged benefits.
Google shows a bunch of people touting green coffee extract as the new miracle weight loss/detox thing. But they’re pills or powders.
Not sure but I’d guess Starbucks was just selling green beans for home roasting. I have some green beans here, and while I wouldn’t say the smell is pleasant, it’s not disgusting either.
Starbucks is selling its new “Refreshers” which they claim is made with green coffee extract, thus having same caffeine as “brown coffee” but without the taste. Not sure if the claim has been verified. The Refreshers are tasty though.
Yeah, green coffee extract is definitely a thing, but I’ve never heard of anybody drinking actual brewed green coffee. Can’t imagine that wouldn’t be bracingly awful.
The extract is supposed to help with weight loss by inhibiting the body’s glucose absorption, not just by using caffeine as a stimulant. There was a recent trial with positive results.
I’m a home roaster, so I have green coffee around. Honestly, I’m not sure I’d want to try to make coffee from it, even for the purposes of science. That sounds like it would just be awful, and a waste of perfectly good coffee.
Now this really makes me want to wonder about the deal.
The way I understand my form of diabetes is that the glucose is not ‘sticking’ to the receptors the way it is supposed to. My meds are there to encourage the glucose to stick properly so my body can process it the way it is supposed to instead of letting it freefloat around and get peed out after damaging nerve and other cells. That is one of the reasons that many type 2s end up gaining weight after being put on medications, they are finally processing glucose properly [and turning the excess into fat :(]
At least one of the stories about extract I read had some sort of medical person quoted similar to, “it does seem to help lose weight, but it’s too early to recommend because altering glucose absorption isn’t necessarily a good idea.”
I read somewhere (probably Digg) that Dr Oz touted the benefits of the Green Coffee beans extract. Supposedly the price has risen since the endorsement. Amazon sells it and the reviews seem mixed.
Dr. Oz promotes every single supplement fad or trend under the sun, moon, or stars. I don’t trust his reccos at all.
Life Extension magazine ran an article (that reads like an infomercial with footnotes and citations) about green coffee extract. Only two studies done on the extract so far, but the article hypothesized several possible mechanisms for effectiveness. It’s more than just altering glucose transport; it’s supposed to activate the liver to burn fat instead of storing it, and a few other things as well to help the metabolism function better.
Ordinary coffee in large has some role in preventing diabetes, supposedly due to the cholorgenic acid. The idea is that doses of green coffee have even higher amounts of chlorogenic acid, and may be even more effective. Not enough studies have been done
yet for any kind of accurate conclustions to be drawn.