Choosing Organic Coffee: Making Healthy Choices for Yourself And The Environment

If you take the time to browse today’s media in one of its many forms, you’ll probably notice a slight pattern in the topics that are addressed on a day-to-day basis – there are almost always headlines about helping the environment, as well as headlines about keeping oneself healthy. Surely both of these issues are extremely important – but did you know that they are actually interrelated? For example, something like organic coffee is both a consumer-friendly alternative for the environment… while also being a better selection for your own health.

Organic Coffee & The Global Perspective

Organic coffee is typically considered to be a ‘shade-grown’ product, which means that it is cultivated under a tree canopy that filters the sunlight. These coffee plants are extremely good for the environment and animal health – particularly birds – because the trees provide a safe habitat for migratory birds and other forms of wildlife. On a conventional coffee farm, typically only around 20 species of birds can be sighted, whereas some countries with shade-grown plants can house up to 150 different species – all which work as natural pesticide control for the coffee plants!

How does this relate to your health? Organic, shade-grown coffee fields can be used repeatedly – since there is no clear cutting or topsoil erosion – which means that the CO2 produced by all those trees is still contributing to the earth, providing pure, clean air. Since there’s no topsoil erosion, it means that the trees are also conserving water, a precious resource in today’s world.

Organic Coffee & You

When was the last time you looked at a food product and thought: “Looks like there are a lot of chemical additives in here, I’d much rather have this item than the preservative-free one over there”? Probably never! In the same way, conventionally grown “full sun” coffee has the potential for more chemical residue than shade-grown organic.

Since full sun coffee is grown in open fields with the plants tightly packed together, the plants often lack the essential nutrients and biological diversity that would contribute to a high-quality and healthy coffee bean. In order to compensate, the plants are sprayed with pesticides and chemical fertilizers, including such products as: DDT, benzene hexachloride, and malathion. While companies do their best to remove any traces of these substances before the beans go to market, the fact is that the coffee is grown with chemicals directly on the plant – no one can remove all the trace elements, no matter how hard they try. The only way to not ingest any chemicals at all? Use organic coffee.

What Benefit Are There in Organic?

Organic coffee is a sustainable crop that not only enhances the quality of life for the farmers who grow it, but which also preserves the environment and helps to create a lasting habitat for the world’s precious plant and animal species. By association, society as a whole then improves, since a better environment and a better standard of living for people in countries of lesser means can simply be nothing other than beneficial!

However, if you’re looking for a more tangible link between organic coffee and your nutritional health – something that affects you on a daily basis – think about the potential chemicals you could be introducing into your system with full sun coffee… and then think about the utter lack of chemicals that could affect your diet when choosing organic!

Another benefit is that it shouldn’t take a lot of extra effort to drink organic coffee, since many companies are now realizing the benefit of organic over traditional. These days, organic coffee comes in every form from whole beans, to ground beans you can use in your espresso stovetop maker, to a coffee espresso machine pod!

The next time you fire up your Saeco Vienna super automatic espresso coffee machine – or head to a coffee shop to have someone else fire one up for you! – make the effort to choose organic coffee first. Your nutritional health – and the rest of the environment – will thank you for it.