A dietary habit that is worth mentioning because of its huge negative impact on health: drinking coffee. Coffee is popular because our society chronically suffers low energy and fatigue. The stimulating effects of coffee are used “to get through the day” and they create dependency. The caffeine does not create or sustain long-term energy; it just hypes the system by over stimulating the adrenals which ultimately carries a long-term price tag. Caffeine increases the amount of sugar in the blood and provides an energy boost, but it also throws body chemistry out of balance, not to mention your Qi.
By doing so, coffee damages health in a lot of ways. Coffee is acidic and contributes to over acidity in the American Diet, changing the ph of our cells (and requiring calcium to be robbed from the tissues to neutralize the acidity). A number of studies have linked caffeine to urinary calcium loss which contributes to osteoporosis, hip fractures and death.
One of those studies, printed in the Jan. 1994 issue of the Journal of The American Medical Association, found that women who drank two cups of coffee per day increased their risk of hip fracture by 69 percent. Coffee has also been linked to cancer. Coffee that is roasted forms of a compound called benzopyrene, a powerful carcinogen; an average cup of coffee contains 500 micrograms of known carcinogens. In, 1981 a Harvard study concluded that coffee drinking was the cause of 50 percent of all pancreatic cancer, and that drinking three cups a day increased the risk of pancreatic cancer threefold.
Why we drink so much coffee is easy to understand. We eat certain foods which causes our cells to function poorly and produce low energy levels. Then, we have deadlines to meet and schedules to keep, and coffee seems the only means to make that happen. Eat real food and eliminate “make believe” food, and you may find that your “need” for coffee declines.