What's the best way to stay healthy in the face of so much conflicting nutrition information?

Well, ideally you would go to the source, the gold standard, the purviewed medical literature and read through the stacks of the latest medical journals.

But who's got time for that? I do!

Welcome to the Nutrition Facts podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Greger.

Today we look at the pros and cons of coffee for the liver, mind and brain.

And we start by asking which coffee is healthier, light roast or dark roast.

For those drinking non-paper-filtered coffee like boiled French press or Turkish coffee,

the amount of cholesterol-raising compounds in the lightest roast coffee,

maybe twice as high compared to using very dark roast beans. So to pierce some of the cholesterol-raising compounds are destroyed by roasting.

So in this case, darker would be better,

or you can just use a paper filter and eliminate 95% of the cholesterol-raising activity of coffee regardless of the roast as I've described before.

But I did another video showing dark roasting may also destroy up to nearly 90% of the chlorogenic acids,

which are the antioxidant anti-inflammatory phytonutrients purported to account for many of coffee's benefits.

So in that case, light roast would be better.

On the other hand, dark roasts can wipe out up to 99.8% of pesticides and conventionally grown coffee,

and more than 90% of a fungal contaminant called okrtoxin,

which is a potent kidney toxin found in a wide range of food ingredients that can get moldy.

But then what about the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon products of combustion that are suspected to be carcinogenic and DNA damaging?

Darker roasts may have up to four times more than light roasts,

thus they advocate controlling roasting conditions to cut down on these combustion compounds.

Just to put things in perspective, even the darkest roast coffee might only max out at a fraction of an anagram of benzopyrin per cup,

considered to be the most toxic of these compounds,

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