Black coffee: why you should avoid milk

Many people enjoy their coffee with a dash of milk. According to newer knowledge, black coffee would be the clearly healthier option. This health tip explains why you should avoid milk in coffee.

Coffee - with milk it loses an important property

Coffee is not only a tasty, but also a healthy drink.

• Coffee is a proven and recommended remedy not only for constipation.
• Enjoying coffee stimulates an important cell process in the body - autophagy.
• Autophagy is the process in cells that breaks down certain components. Such components can be either damaged proteins or whole cell bodies. The breakdown products are recycled by the cell.
• Autophagy is therefore an important recycling program for cell health. The Japanese Yoshinori Ohsumi even received the Nobel Prize in Medicine for discovering this self-cleaning mechanism.
• Black coffee has been shown to stimulate this autophagy. It has not yet been established which substance is responsible for this in the drink. It is believed that certain phytochemicals, the polyphenols, trigger the autophagy process.
• It's definitely not caffeine. So it doesn't matter whether you drink caffeinated or decaffeinated coffee - the main thing is that you skip the milk.

Milk slows down the autophagy process

The bad news for all friends of milk coffee and cappuccino: the positive effect of coffee with regard to cell self-cleaning is lost when you drink milk coffee.

• However, this only applies to cow's milk. The animal protein in milk is responsible for the autophagy-inhibiting effect. More specifically, the culprit is the amino acid methionine.
• If you use vegetable milk such as almond milk, it does not slow down autophagy.
• On the contrary: vegetable soy and wheat contain proteins that even stimulate autophagy.

If you really want to enjoy the pick-me-up freshly, you can roast your coffee yourself. We will show you how in our next nutrition tip.