The Hidden Costs of Coffee: Understanding Its Dehydrating Effect

In Chinese medicine we understand that hydration is the cornerstone of health! Without hydration we can’t do all the things our body needs to do to get pathogenic factors out: sneeze, sweat, cough, vomit, urinate, defecate! When we hear the word hydration, we think of water, and while plain flat water is extremely important as a vehicle for elimination from the body, it is not a deep hydrator! For that we think of soups, broths, stews, and porridges! But what also lowers systemic hydrations are the systemic DEhydrators, and one of the most common of those in our culture, is coffee! Coffee is a concentrated, bitter fruit and when you put that data through the lens of this medicine, you find that it is a triple dehydrator! It’s a concentrate; you need a lot of those beans to make a cup! But the body is not geared to digest concentrates! It reads them as toxins, since nearly all toxins in nature are highly concentrated, and it knows it must respond by purging! Second, it’s very bitter! Nearly all toxins are very bitter and so again, a purge is stimulated! Third, it’s a fruit! Fruits act as defensive qi stimulants, which means they clear accumulations from the body! When you put these three factors—concentrated, bitter, fruit—on your tongue at the same time, the brain receives a focussed message to purge and to do it fast! It goes to work, first at the liver whose job it is to process toxins or store them if it can’t keep up with them! The liver releases some of its toxic load to the kidneys to make room for the incoming threat! The kidneys read that event as an emergency and engage the adrenals to speed up the process! This is the super famous coffee high! And what follows is the purge itself—urination and defecation! The purge comes at a price because the body uses its fluids to create the purge and so the net effect of coffee is dehydration! But that’s not all! No! The heat that is generated in the process, which we call wei qi—a subset of yang qi—is hot, and so there is inflammation now in play! And ironically that heat consumes fluids and so the person enters a spiraling dehydrating situation! Then the body has to accumulate dampness—swellings made by waste fluids in the gut—in order to buffer the tissues and the organs from that heat! Over time, the heat and dampness combine and the body tries to hide it in various places including the belt channel and the joints, and when it can’t be contained there any longer, the heat leaks out and consumes the flesh and threatens the organs, forcing the body to create what’s known as substantial dampness—nodules and tumors, in its ingenious quest to defend the organs against decimation through inflammation! Meanwhile, the body is so exhausted from having the adrenal glands artificially stimulated that it chooses to stop releasing the daily magical puff of adrenal that it is supposed to release upon waking, which is nature’s way of making us excited about life, and so we get depressed and drink more coffee! Every day, the thrashing of the adrenal glands chips away at our ability to generate immune responses to pathogens and cold and we become ill, tired, weak and depressed over time! It’s all reversible! Body, mind and spirit thrive with hydrators!”