From toxins in food and the environment, to stress and lack of work-life balance can make us sick– often we don’t know why.
With so much conflicting information out there about what we should be eating to achieve better health, the decision process can be confusing and overwhelming. It often causes people to just throw up their hands and give up.
Habit change is hard. And even when we do make changes, we often don’t know whether or not they’re helping or causing us more problems. Andrew Salisbury was inspired to start Purity Coffee for this very reason.
A few years ago, Andrew’s wife Amber began to experience debilitating fatigue. After living a normal, active life, she was now struggling to perform her daily activities. She would often go to sleep at 8 p.m. and wake up as exhausted as if she hadn’t slept at all.
Doctors were stumped. Amber and Andrew were frustrated. Medical tests revealed nothing. The couple had been doing everything that healthy adults should: exercising regularly, eating healthy and organic foods, getting regular sleep, and drinking plenty of purified water. Nothing seemed to help.
To get through the day, Amber began drinking copious amounts of coffee–a morning mug or two plus up to six k-cups a day! Andrew was concerned that her coffee drinking might be contributing to her health problems. After all, so much common-knowledge health advice includes cutting coffee out of our diets altogether to improve energy levels.
But Amber had found something that worked for her, and she wasn’t giving it up without proof. So Andrew set out to discover whether a frequent coffee habit was helping or hindering her recovery. Fortunately, the couple got the opportunity to pick the brains of some of the world’s foremost experts from the Vanderbilt University Institute of Coffee Studies. What they learned shocked them.
Andrew and Amber learned that not only is coffee NOT unhealthy, but it has been shown to actively improve health.
Over 19,000 studies have been done to measure coffee’s health benefits, and their results have overwhelmingly pointed to coffee’s healing properties. Coffee has been shown to decrease risk of diabetes, heart disease, liver disease, Alzheimer’s, and multiple cancers.
And it doesn’t just help a little bit. Research has shown that 3-5 cups of coffee per day has an astonishing array of health benefits.
In this excerpt from an interview conducted with renowned author and Dean of Harvard Medical, Dr. Sanjiv Chopra, we learn that coffee possesses amazing qualities when it comes to healing the body and disease prevention.
Much of these benefits are thanks to antioxidants called chlorogenic acids, or CGAs. These compounds fight the inflammation that can lead to heart disease, type 2 diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and all kinds of other life-threatening conditions.
Coffee is one of the healthiest foods in the Western diet. It’s an established scientific fact, and there are mountains of proof.
Purity Co-Founders: (left to right) Missy and Jon Butcher with Amber and Andrew Salisbury
The mind-blowing truth about coffee begged two questions
The first: Why didn’t more people–specifically doctors–know about the health benefits of coffee?
The second was: Were any other companies producing coffee made with health as the top priority?
The experts from the Institute of Coffee Studies said that there weren’t any coffee companies doing this to their knowledge. The fact that people didn’t know about coffee’s benefits, however, came from years of misunderstood data.
Back in the 1950s, studies found correlation between certain diseases and coffee consumption. These weren’t studies conducted in the lab–but surveys that took into account people’s self-reported habits. Unfortunately, these studies didn’t take other factors into account like alcohol and tobacco consumption. Diseases that we now know are caused mostly by booze and cigarettes were unfairly connected to coffee.
Coffee researchers needed help to change the public’s negative attitudes toward coffee, and the Salisburys were ready to take on that challenge. Enlisting Jon and Missy Butcher in their plan, the Purity founders set out to highlight coffee’s benefits–and to increase them as much as possible!
Photo by Devin Tavery
They brought together a team of industry professionals, scientists, and medical practitioners to help design a process maximizing coffee’s health benefits during every step of production. Purity’s experts were committed to spreading the good word about coffee’s incredible ability to improve daily wellness and increase overall longevity.
Through extensive research, they developed a signature process to increase the health benefits and decrease coffee’s side effects like caffeine jitters and gastric distress.
The Blueprint for the Purity Process
1. Conscious Sourcing. Not only do we focus on the health of the coffee itself, but we also have a commitment to environmental sustainability, responsibility to the communities where the coffee is grown, and attention to each stage of the coffee production and distribution processes. Coffee is mostly treated as an industrial crop and often commercial coffee is sprayed with pesticides and must be managed properly, or else it can become contaminated with molds, which can lead to mycotoxins. Purity only sources organic beans and tests all green coffee for mold, pesticides, heavy metals, Ochratoxin A (which can cause kidney damage), and other mycotoxins.
2. Specialty Grade. “Specialty” grade signifies that the coffee has been carefully inspected and sorted to avoid defects. Coffee defects can be caused by numerous factors during the farming, harvesting, processing, or drying of the coffee. During farming, defects come primarily from pests and diseases, but also unhealthy plants tend to produce unhealthy coffee, which means soil quality and adequate water also are critical to producing healthy coffee.
3. Precision Roasting. Through lab testing, Purity determines a unique roasting framework for each of our products. As much as possible our aim is to retain maximum antioxidants in coffee beans, avert PAH development and reduce the end level of acrylamide (which is higher in under-roasted coffee). It is important to emphasize that while high-temperature heat will kill the microorganisms and mold spores, it won't remove most mycotoxins.
4. Focused Fulfillment. The last area for ensuring coffee is as healthy as it can be lies in its storage, packaging, and delivery. Once the coffee is removed from the roaster, it is of utmost importance that the coffee is protected from contamination during the packaging process. Food safety practices must be employed, and Purity has protocols and procedures in place that exceed FDA cGMPs. All foodstuffs are capable of going stale or even rancid, and coffee is no exception. Some coffees can languish on warehouse or supermarket shelves for months, becoming more likely to cause digestive discomfort from oxidation of lipids and staling. We prevent this by nitrogen flushing our coffee before sealing the bags, but also our coffee is roasted several times a week, so everything we ship is very fresh.