As a coffee drinker, you may be wondering if it unhealthy or harmful? Let’s talk about it.
You may be hearing or reading about a recent trend: coffee drinkers are adding CBD Oil to their cups of coffee. While the word “trend” implies perhaps a fleeting, short-lived fashionable behavior that certainly won’t persist, drinking CBD coffee might just become a long-lasting, staple, daily health decision for people because of recent research about and anecdotal experiences of the benefits of adding CBD oil to Coffee.
Lets go ahead then and break it down and take each part of the equation separately to see its individual and then combined effects
What are the Benefits of adding CBD Oil to Coffee?
By adding CBD oil to coffee you counteract some of the negative side effects of caffeine. In addition, you get the added benefit of providing relief from some physical and emotional challenges. .
Although you can consume Cannabidiol (CBD) with several methods like eating gummies, vaping or adding to food, the increasing method of ingesting CBD in coffee is favorable for a few reasons.
CBD is the compound in marijuana that doesn’t get you high. Recent studies are showing that CBD may offer several therapeutic benefits on its own and at the same time be effectively counteracting some of the caffeine-related side effects of coffee consumption. CBD studies are demonstrating that CBD use may decrease anxiety, reduce seizures and minimize inflammation.
When you consider coffee and the jitters and high-strung after effects it sometimes produces, people who are adding CBD to their coffee are enjoying the energy and alertness of coffee consumption without the sometimes-experienced increased agitation and anxiety.
If CBD is known to make a person feel sleepy, doesn’t it compete in the body with the coffee’s caffeine and leave a person feeling groggy? And likewise, wouldn’t coffee’s caffeine, known to make some people’s anxiety worse, override the anti-anxiety effects of CBD? What about dosage and ratios? Does the temperature of the coffee affect, negate or increase, the CBD effect?
Researchers who are starting to study CBD state that for people with serious medical conditions who are taking CBD to reduce seizure disorders or autoimmune disorder-related inflammation shouldn’t take CBD with coffee since accurate CBD dosing is crucial for efficacy.
However, for a healthy person, CBD can be consumed as a nutritional bonus or supplement, and precise dosing and timing issues are not relevant. It was determined that CBD stability in cannabis hot drinks is affected and not consistent with a heated drink versus non-heated consumption.
What are the benefits of drinking Coffee?
Let’s start with coffee. A recent study published in July 2018 in the highly reputable medical, peer-reviewed journal JAMA Internal Medicine, shows that drinking coffee could boost human probabilities of living a longer life, even for people who consume large quantities of coffee.
The research study, which included people aged 38 to 73, showed that people who were drinking 2 to 3 cups of coffee per day had about a 12% reduced risk of death when compared to non-coffee drinkers. The study showed an association between coffee and health.
Likewise, a study that was published last year in the BMJ British Medical Journal also reviewed 200 other studies about coffee and determined that drinking 3 to 4 cups of coffee a day positively contributed to health.
And also in 2018, researchers in Spain reported that people who drink at least four cups of coffee each day had a 64 percent reduced risk of death compared with those who never or almost never drink coffee. These studies are more and more connecting coffee consumption to longer and perhaps healthier life.
Some medical professionals are skeptical about endorsing a coffee habit, stating for instance at John Hopkins Bloomberg school of public health in Baltimore, Maryland, that it is difficult to know with certainty whether coffee prevents chronic disease and decreases mortality simply because there are many factors to consider such as why people start drinking coffee and what kinds of coffee they’re drinking which would affect details and control factors of many studies.
How Does adding CBD oil in Coffee help Medical Conditions?
Anecdotally, healthy people not looking to CBD coffee to address specific serious medical conditions, are loving it for the most part. People report that a few minutes after consuming CBD coffee they felt alert and focused, but differently from just a caffeine boost, and difficult to nail down the precise feeling of the mental and emotional boost. CBD affects people differently.
Contrary to popular belief, CBD is a stimulating compound when consumed in low doses. A combination of CBD and coffee could result in a person feeling overstimulated.
For others, it could be a just right effect of alert yet calm. One report recommends spacing CBD coffee out in three-hour increments between servings, and again, cutting off after 2 o’clock in the afternoon if coffee is known to affect nighttime sleeping.
You can try various methods and journal what and when you did and how you felt, immediately and afterwards. You may, like some people, feel great: A sensation of being extremely alert, but surprisingly calm.
One person said CBD coffee made her feel like it took off the edge but not like she was under any influence of a drug. The trick you may learn for yourself if that one regular non-CBD cup of coffee first may be a best way to benefit from incorporating CBD coffee as your second cup of coffee.
As for measurements, a more common instruction is to use a teaspoon and a half of coffee and 5 milligrams of CBD for a 6-ounce cup of coffee. When you use quality coffee beans you’re more likely to not perceive any sort of hint of CBD flavor.
With your ideal CBD coffee recipe and consumption regimen, it may take a few attempts to find what works for you. You may also notice a change over time in that your body is getting use to the CBD and may need to revisit and experiment again as time goes on to see what works and feels best for you.
The effects of mixing CBD with coffee aren’t fully understood but anecdotally, many people are enjoying the results. If coffee sometimes leaves you feeling a bit wired, a dash of CBD could mellow the impact.
Experiencing a pleasant, alert and focused energy of coffee caffeine (and terrific coffee benefits detailed above!) without the jitters and anxiety could be a pretty awesome addition to your routine.
Tolerance of different extracts and oils vary by genetic design and any prior uses and experiences, and the amount in different blends, grounds, temperatures and combinations can modify results and effects.
Several studies show that coffee consumption reduces the risk of cirrhosis by as much as 80%, specifically in three studies of people who drink 4 or more cups of coffee per day. Two studies show that coffee may lower your risk of liver cancer by nearly 40%.
What are the effects of Caffeine in Coffee?
The active ingredient of coffee is caffeine, which acts as a stimulant and is the most normally consumed psychoactive ingredient in the world. Caffeine blocks the effects in the brain of adenosine, an inhibitory neurotransmitter.
When adenosine is blocked by caffeine, the neuronal firing in the brain is increased and releases other neurotransmitters like dopamine and norepinephrine, which have been shown to temporarily improve mood, memory, reaction time, vigilance and general functions of the brain.
Additionally, partly due to caffeine’s stimulant effect on the central nervous system, it both raises metabolism and at the same time increases the oxidation of fatty acids, which is said to result in improvements in athletic performance in many ways like mobilizing fatty acids from the fat tissues, increasing exercise performance by almost 12%, according to some recent studies.
In other studies, coffee consumption was recurrently associated with a lower risk of type 2 diabetes, ranging in reduced risk from 23% to 67% across four studies.
An enormous review of 18 studies that included 457,922 participants showed that for every additional cup of coffee consumed per day by a person their risk of developing type 2 diabetes was reduced by 7%. That is, the more coffee consumed, the lower their risk of type 2 diabetes.
Coffee is also shown to possibly protect the brain in older age. Coffee drinkers have been shown in studies to have up to a 60% lower risk of developing dementia diseases, including Alzheimer’s disease, the most common neurodegenerative disorder in the world and a leading cause of dementia.
Also, Parkinson’s disease, the second most common neuro degenerative disorder, which is categorized by the death of the brain’s dopamine-generating neurons, has been shown in at least four studies to be reduced by 32% to 60% for those who drink coffee.
Coffee and the Liver
And what about coffee and the liver — that extraordinary organ that is responsible for several vital bodily functions? The liver is vulnerable to overconsumption of alcohol and fructose, sometimes resulting in end stage liver damage of cirrhosis.
Coffee and Antioxidants
Are you ready for one of the most surprising pieces of data surrounding health benefits of coffee? Coffee is packed with nutrients and antioxidants! It’s not just black water, nope.
A lot of the nutrients of quality coffee beans make it into your final drink, and on average, one cup of coffee contains 6% of the RDA for pantothenic acid (vitamin B5), 11% of the RDA for riboflavin (vitamin B2), 2% of the RDA for niacin (B3) and thiamine (B1), and 3% of the RDA for potassium and manganese. When you drink more than one cup a day, those numbers rise accordingly.
And coffee is one of the largest sources of antioxidants of the largest sources of antioxidants of the Western diet, outranking several kinds of fruits and vegetables.
Antioxidants and How They Work
Antioxidants work to disarm what are called free radicals that are constantly attacking the body and which damage vital body molecules like proteins and DNA. Oxidative stress results from free radical damage and leads to further or quicker effects of aging and many diseases, like cancers.
Coffee’s powerful antioxidants include hydro cinnamic acids and polyphenols, the first of which effectively neutralizes free radicals and helps prevent oxidative stress, and the second of which helps prevent poor health conditions like heart disease, cancer and type 2 diabetes.
Some studies show that people tend to consume about 1–2 grams of antioxidants each day, mostly from beverages like coffee and tea. In the Western diet, about 79% of dietary antioxidants were sourced from beverages where only about 21% came from non-beverage foods.
Health and Antioxidants
When daily diet habits are considered, people were found to simply consume more antioxidant-rich drinks than non-beverage foods. Of course, antioxidant content of different foods differs by serving size, and coffee ranks near 11th on a list behind several types of berries.
While people tend to eat fewer berry servings each day but drink several cups of coffee per day, the total antioxidant amounts provided from coffee exceedingly outweighs the amount provided by berries, although berries tend to contain greater amounts of antioxidants per serving.
Norwegian and Finnish studies concluded that coffee is the single largest antioxidant source consumed, providing generally about 64% of a person’s total antioxidant intake from an average coffee intake of 450–600 ml per day, or about 2–4 cups of coffee.
Similar studies from France, Poland, Spain and Japan demonstrated that coffee is the largest consumed dietary source of antioxidants.
Because coffee doesn’t provide the exact same antioxidants as whole plant foods like fruits and vegetables, coffee shouldn’t be a person’s sole source of antioxidants.
Consuming a variety of healthy, whole plant compounds from a variety of sources will provide your best optimal nutrient resources for vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants.
Your coffee will be even healthier if you avoid adding sugar of course, and if drinking coffee seems to be affecting your nighttime sleep, it’s recommended to not drink coffee after two o’clock in the afternoon.
A bold statement but Coffee may just be the healthiest beverage on the planet!
When you consider all the evidence about coffee consumption, most studies related to coffee consumption and health find a beneficial association. But while coffee is found to be energizing and healthy, there are also claims that coffee is addictive and harmful.
For instance,, even when acutely considering the amazing benefits of coffee consumption, the possible prolonged life longevity and enhanced physical health attributed to coffee are sometimes not pursued by people simply due to some of the possible side effects of drinking coffee for some people that include issues like:
- nervousness and restlessness (the jitters)
- anxiety
- agitation
- insomnia
- stomach upset
- headache
- heart palpitations
- shaky hands
- nausea,
- non-productive increase in heart and breathing rate
Final Thoughts
As with most applications of CBD consumption, the scientific research on effects when combined with coffee and caffeine is limited presently, but growing.
Talk with your doctor, be informed, do your own reputable research, take small doses at a time, and be sure you’re consuming high quality CBD if you choose to use it.
Be aware that regulations and data related to marijuana, CBD, and other related products are developing all the time.
Always consult with your medical professionals prior to consuming substances and supplements that could impact your health and well-being.
The best and most simple advice, as with any approved herbal medicines, is to start low and go slow, finding for yourself as you reflect on each experience your own sweet spot with CBD coffee, determined by your own individual system and responses to the substances.