Where are all the coffee lovers at? I have good news for you!
A study completed earlier this year by researchers at the University of Nottingham in the UK found that drinking coffee could help fight obesity. They discovered that drinking coffee can stimulate brown fat, which could be a key to tackling obesity and diabetes.
Stimulation of brown fat allows our bodies to burn more calories as energy. It also has the potential to improve blood sugar control and blood lipid levels. Caffeine is the main ingredient in coffee that helps stimulate this kind of fat.
This is good news for coffee drinkers; at least for those who are not sensitive or intolerant to caffeine. There are a handful of individuals who have a mutation on their CYP1A2 gene, which causes their bodies to metabolize caffeine differently in the liver.
It's important to note that this study was conducted with black coffee. No dairy, sugar or other substances were added to the coffee. So if you know that you can tolerate caffeine and would like to try stimulating brown fat for health benefits, make sure you're consuming black coffee. I recommend going above and beyond this and suggest you look for a really good quality organic coffee. Coffee is a heavily sprayed crop, and often times, pesticides can get into your cup of joe unsuspectingly.
An awesome thing that came out of this study is that scientists are now looking into ways to isolate the brown fat stimulating ingredient in coffee so it can be used in isolation to help reduce the world obesity epidemic. Obesity is rapidly becoming more common and is the cause of many metabolic diseases.