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00:00:01
Alex Higham
56 Plays4 years ago
Alex is the founder of Exhale Healthy Coffee, we do a bit of a deep dive into coffee. I admit that my knowledge around coffee was that it contained caffeine which makes you more alert and can help with performance but alas! There is a lot more to it.
Alex explains the health benefits of coffee, explains about the compounds within his coffee and how they have some quite remarkable amounts of goodness in them and we also talk about coffee for performance.
Enjoy!
Connect with Alex on:
Use code RUN40 for 40% discount on your first order.
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Transcript
Introduction and Coffee's Benefits
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to episode 37 of the UK Sports Chat podcast. In today's show, I speak with Alex Hyam. Alex is the founder of Exhale Healthy Coffee. We do a bit of a deep dive into coffee. I must admit that my knowledge around coffee was that it contained caffeine, which makes you more alert and can help with performance. But alas, there is a lot more to it.
00:00:25
Speaker
Alex explains the health benefits of coffee. He also talks about the compounds within his coffee and how they have some quite remarkable amounts of goodness in them. Quite shocking, actually. And we also talk about coffee for performance, amongst other things. Hope you enjoy the episode. If you get a moment, please leave us a review and see you on next week's episode. Welcome, Alex. How are you? Yeah, I'm very good, mate. How are you doing? Yep. Very good. Thank you. Very good.
Alex's Athletic Achievements and Inspiration
00:00:54
Speaker
So, as I said in the introduction, and I took this from your website, you're the founder of Exhale Healthy Coffee, and you're an Ironman. Marathon swimmer I was interested in. Have you swam a marathon? Tell me about that. So, to count as a marathon swimmer, it has to be over 10 kilometres. So, the longest I've done is 14 kilometres. So, yeah, not quite the same as a running marathon, but it still took about five hours, you know.
00:01:22
Speaker
That's a long way. That's a long way to swim. It's quite, it's quite meditative. I'm actually considering doing an ultra, an ultra swim run, which is you swim over a swim Lake Windermere and then run 84 kilometers to bring the total distance up to a hundred kilometers. And that's an ultra swim run.
00:01:44
Speaker
But anyways, I'm hoping those pools are open again. I'll get time to start training for that. Yeah. Is that you, is that you, I see that you've been an Ironman. Is that your favorite discipline to swim in or?
00:01:56
Speaker
Running actually is my favorite discipline. And open, I really love open water swimming, but the problem is living in London, they just don't get too much opportunity to do much of that. So running is just so easy and convenient. Like literally I get up at six o'clock in the morning, go for an hour's run before the kids are back, before the kids even wake up.
From Accounting to Coffee Passion
00:02:16
Speaker
So it's just, it's just the perfect exercise to fit into a busy life, you know? Yeah, couldn't agree more.
00:02:25
Speaker
So give us a little bit of an intro on yourself and how you got into your passion for coffee. Yeah, so I basically have been an accountant for the last 15 years, but also I've done a lot of travelling. I've been well into, whenever I can, I've kind of worked for a year or two in accounts and then I've saved enough money to go travelling for a year and then kind of like alternated that and been five times travelling.
00:02:53
Speaker
And one of the times was to Bali and I was doing a lot of surfing there and Bali's the kind of Aussies stomping ground and Australians are well into their coffee, they're well ahead of us in terms of kind of speciality coffee and stuff like that.
00:03:05
Speaker
It was around six years ago that was in Bali. And yeah, kind of got a taste for speciality cafes over there, speciality coffee, how much importance they put on it, how kind of many different ways they brew it. And then also how beneficial it was for my surfing over there. And especially as a sleep deprived dad, because we had like a six month old baby with us. And I just kind of realized the kind of full power of coffee and sports and
00:03:34
Speaker
And yeah, how much it could benefit your performance, basically. How old was the little one? I just lost you there. How old was the little one while you were acting? So six months when we left. OK. Yeah, so we were kind of we went away for four months while my wife was on maternity leave. Yeah. And then the second time when we had our next baby, we went when that baby was four months and we spent six months travelling. And yeah, it's pretty hardcore.
00:04:04
Speaker
Yeah, it's probably not a few years of my life, I always say. But you know, it's given me a lot of memories. So it was pretty epic. You remind me of, I've read this, it's quite a well known book, The Four Hour Workweek. Have you ever read that?
00:04:19
Speaker
I've heard of it. I've heard of it. I'm the opposite. I'm more like the, what is it? 400 hour work week? I don't know. I'll get that now with the money. The gist of that book is about, it talks about having mini retirements. Tim Ferriss, the author is. And it's pretty much what you've just described in different ways. So you worked for a couple of years.
00:04:43
Speaker
and then take some time off and do the things that you want to do in life rather than saving it all up for interest. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. It sounds like a man I'd get on well with. I think it's the only way I could have been an accountant for 15 years to be honest. So hey, it served me well. So you did a lot of traveling.
00:05:02
Speaker
Before you had children, I'm guessing then, or was that? Yeah, exactly. It's kind of always been part of our kind of existence, basically. We've always done it. And then when we had, when my wife got pregnant with the first kid, we kind of, we've been three times before for like over a year each time. And then when she got pregnant with her first baby, we're like, right, we don't want to, we don't want, everyone says having a baby changes everything. And then you kind of stop.
00:05:28
Speaker
doing the things you love and you stop being fun and etc etc and you hear all these horror stories and we're like right we need to book our flights to go traveling before the baby's born and book non-refundable flights to make sure we actually go and do it and we can't chicken out of it so we booked flights to Indonesia and then followed through with it.
00:05:49
Speaker
Amazing, fair play. I've got three myself, I'm not as daring as you. So you're in Bali, you're experiencing these speciality coffees? Yep. So take me from there, and this is a big question, but how do you go from then liking coffee over there, and you said to give you a boost with your
00:06:13
Speaker
with your surfing, so how do you go from that to now finishing your career as an accountant and having a business like Exhale?
Health Challenges and Business Genesis
00:06:26
Speaker
Yeah, so what happened was when I got back from Bali, the company I worked for organised an Olympic distance triathlon and I did it and loved it and did really quite well
00:06:38
Speaker
in it, maybe helped while the coffee was drinking, did really well, really loved it. And then I was like, right, I need to put more of these, get more into this. And then my health, I started getting loads of weird health issues and my health just literally plummeted and there's ill all the time, had loads of stuff going on. And then the next year I'd entered a handful of different triathlons and swims and had to pull out with them all because they literally just couldn't do any training.
00:07:03
Speaker
and then over the next few years I just started research, I mean I was in and out of every hospital across London pretty much and still out and I just spent the next few years researching health and also at the same time kind of reading up on how I could
00:07:21
Speaker
further my own kind of sporting kind of train smarter and working on nutrition to try and support my health and kind of performance and basically just kind of research from both of those angles from the health side and then the sports side and then kind of the more research the more red I realized coffee just kept coming up and
00:07:41
Speaker
both sides of the spectrum. And I realized that coffee actually could be not only really beneficial for your performance, but actually could really support your health as well. So that's where my line of research steered over the last few years. And then I basically decided to set up the healthy coffee business probably about three years ago. And I'm ashamed to say it's taken me this long to get it going. I've looked at the website, though. You've been doing a lot of research, to be fair. So we'll come on to that.
00:08:12
Speaker
Go on, sorry. No, there's a lot of research to be read. So yeah, so it's going to, it's been a fun part of it. Unfortunately, um, I don't have as much time as I'd like to read the research these days, but yeah. Okay. So, so you, so you were in poor health, you were looking at it for the health benefits as well as enjoying a triathlon and looking for the performance benefits. So, so how, tell me,
00:08:39
Speaker
Yeah, give me the story of how you got to your product.
00:08:44
Speaker
Okay, so I was reading all of this to my specific product or the idea of the product. So I guess the more I read on the research, the more convinced, I kind of approached it from a guilty until proven innocent kind of perspective. The more I read of the research, the more I realized that actually the more convinced it became that coffee actually could be really healthy.
00:09:11
Speaker
And then I started reading more and more about what it is in coffee that could be causing the health benefits. And there's a handful of different compounds and chemicals which had been just kept on cropping up in study after study. So there's been kind of, in the last 10 years, there's been over 8,000 studies on coffee and its implications on health. So it's really well researched. And there's certain things like the polyphenols in coffee and chlorogenic acid being a particular group of them.
00:09:39
Speaker
and loads of other things that just kept coming up and then I started reading about how to find coffees that were high in these so there's a huge variability in say the chlorogenic acid content of coffees. There's one particular study which was
00:09:58
Speaker
A study in which looked at is a 2014 study and they looked at 104 espressos from cafes in Scotland, Italy and Spain and they showed a 31-fold difference between the highest and low concentrations.
The Science of Healthy Coffee
00:10:11
Speaker
So there's a huge amount of variability. So I started kind of trying to figure out
00:10:15
Speaker
exactly what particular types of conditions or types of coffees or things that might affect the concentration of it in coffee and then about a year ago I set about this process of
00:10:29
Speaker
testing and again we put our coffee through nine different rounds of testing to find a coffee that was higher than any other in all of the healthy compounds and didn't have any of the ones that could potentially be negative in coffee. I can go into detail as to what they are but yeah that was the broad premise of it. Okay so why has there been over 8,000 studies?
00:10:54
Speaker
But because coffee is one of the most consumed drinks in the world, and that's only 8,000 in the last 10 years, so in the early days, this was about 50, 60 years ago, so coffee got a bit of a bad rep as being linked to all sorts of
00:11:11
Speaker
Illnesses and diseases and negative health outcomes and it got a bit of a bad rep around here 50 years ago because these early studies didn't adjust for what we call confounding variables.
00:11:26
Speaker
So it's because which means that people who smoked or drank or had poor dietary lifestyle habits were more likely to drink coffee as well. So the early studies didn't adjust for that. So coffee kind of got lumped in with these other bad behaviors and got a bad rep. And then over the years, because coffee is drunk so much, people have been really
00:11:48
Speaker
studying it and it's been yeah scientists have been fascinated by trying to understand more about coffee so it's yeah it's because so many people drink it really it's kind of naturally something that would be most studied yeah okay so if I if I think about coffee and if you ask
00:12:06
Speaker
most people, you'd ask them, you know, what's in coffee, and everyone would say caffeine. And I can, so I have a friend who's a bodybuilder, he's been doing it 20 years, and I can remember when he first started in our early mid 20s, he used to take caffeine, and he'd say, because it boosts me up for the workout, and it helps me with weight, with losing weight. And I can remember him saying that, but from what you're saying, you were just,
00:12:33
Speaker
You'll have to remind me of what the names are, the compounds. What else is in coffee and what are these things that you went looking for to make your coffee so healthy? What are they? Yeah, so the biggest one that's kind of...
00:12:48
Speaker
that's repeatedly comes up with the polyphenols and chlorogenic acid in particular is the biggest one. So chlorogenic acid and polyphenols have been shown to have kind of really potent antioxidant effects, potent anti-inflammatory, cardio protective, neuroprotective, lots of different effects. And they're the ones that we kind of, most of our tests, lab tests were tailored towards finding a coffee that was high in these and we had a list
00:13:18
Speaker
of 45 other coffees, which we found online. And through all of our process, we found a coffee that was 40% higher than any other in this list of 45 coffees. So we kind of nailed it on the chlorogenic acids. And then aside from that, there's other compounds like these diterpenes, kafestone, carol, which also have anti-cancer, anti-inflammatory liver-protective effects.
00:13:47
Speaker
And we optimise for those without actually testing for them. So they're associated with the oils in coffee, so the fats in coffee. So as you get towards a darker roast and you see a shiny oily surface of the bean, that's the oils leaving the bean.
00:14:06
Speaker
and taking with it the capstone car wheel so by roasting the coffee to just shy of that that roast degree that that would cause the oils to kind of leave the coffee we've kind of made sure that the coffee is retained as much of those as possible and then these other things like these melanoidins that are formed during the roasting process
00:14:25
Speaker
So you want to kind of roast the coffee and they're kind of they peek around a medium roast So the sign says so he kind of and then they start dropping off a cliff as you get towards a darker roast So we kind of aimed for that medium row So it seems seemed that on multiple different levels the medium roast was the kind of happy medium Yeah, happy medium of the roast degree So did you say you had 45 that you were looking at? Yeah
00:14:53
Speaker
So the list of 45 chlorogenic acid was an online list of 45 coffees but we did actually as well test 45 different coffees around about 45. 45 coffees from importers. So the start of our process
00:15:10
Speaker
So our whole process that took for the whole of last year, so we started off by setting the bar. So we tested 10 coffees ourselves, the top 10 brands by revenue, top 10 coffee brands in the UK, tested those for polyphenols and that set the bar that we had to beat. And then we went to the seven
00:15:28
Speaker
best importers in the UK of speciality grade coffee and said can you give us every one of your coffees that fit this certain criteria that we had around it had to be organic it had to be processed in a certain way
00:15:41
Speaker
And then we got back around 40 to 45 coffees from the seven importers and they were from every corner of the globe. And then we taste tested all of these coffees because we wanted to find a coffee that people wanted to drink basically and that I could drink every day. Very important. I mean, what use is a healthy food if no one wants to drink it?
00:16:01
Speaker
And then, so we chose our kind of favorite 13 or 14 tasting coffees, and then we sent them off to get tested, polyphenols, and we chose the highest out of those. And then the next stage was the roasting. So we roasted that coffee. So we chose a coffee with the highest inherent potential, and then we roasted it multiple different ways.
00:16:24
Speaker
because the roasting of the coffee really modifies its kind of compounds in it so and then we chose the healthiest roast profile of the healthiest coffee basically which be all of the others. I'm just imagining you all tasting these 45 coffees it must have been like you must have all been wired counting them in the kitchen. Well we made sure we did it in the morning so there's plenty of time to metabolize the coffee in.
00:16:51
Speaker
No, it's good fun. You meant to spit it out afterwards, but it's quite difficult. That's a lot of coffee, that's a lot of research and a big process that you've been through, hasn't it?
00:17:07
Speaker
yeah that's the tip of the iceberg so that was just the first three stages and then after that we tested the the winning coffee for mycotoxins pesticides heavy metals um for the niacin content who did this and how did you do it did you have some help with this um so i kind of
00:17:28
Speaker
So we've got our Chief Wellness Officer, this chap called Alex Manos, who is a functional medicine practitioner. He's one of the most educated and overly qualified nutritionists, functional medicine chaps in the country. So he knows his stuff. But the testing, I basically spent a long time finding different labs across Europe.
00:17:51
Speaker
There's one in Denmark, one in Germany, there's one in Plymouth that do all this testing, so a lot of different testing. And then, of course, my favorite test and my favorite advisor through the business has been Dr. Jan down at the lab in Plymouth. So this is our final test and the most exciting of all was the anti-oxidant test.
00:18:13
Speaker
Okay, so we've done all of this lengthy process to find the coffee that was high in all of these compounds, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they're actually active, the compound. So just because it's got a load of polyphenols in and chlorogenic acid in and whatnot doesn't mean that they're active and they're actively kind of scavenging free radicals or reducing oxidative stress or whatever. So the final test was we found this lab down in Plymouth
00:18:40
Speaker
night scientific and we sent a bag of our coffee down to Dr Jam, who had been kind of a close advisor and still is actually, sent a bag of our coffee down, a cafeteria hand grinder and some brewing instructions and she brewed a cup of our coffee to our exact instructions and she then tested the antioxidant power of one brewed cup of our coffee.
00:19:03
Speaker
And she also went out to a local supermarket and bought a bag of blueberries, kale and oranges, and tested those as well. And then she found that one cup of our coffee, one brewed cup of our coffee has the same antioxidant power as 12. It's a blueberries, 55 oranges are 1.2 kilos of kale, only one cup of our coffee. So that's when we knew we'd nailed it and we've got all the testing, right? Yeah. Yeah. We found a good coffee. Yeah. That's incredible.
00:19:30
Speaker
So yeah, no, it was good fun. It was, um, it was really fun. Just every time we got another set of test results back, it was just like, yeah. Anything else like it then? Cause I told me to talk about other coffees, but it's not.
00:19:46
Speaker
So there's a couple of coffees that test to avoid the negatives in coffee. So coffee, I mentioned before, kind of things like mycotoxins and pesticides in it and stuff. And there's a couple of coffees to test to ensure that it's free of those. So they're selling the coffee on the premise that it is, is not going to give you any mycotoxins exposure, which, you know, it's an issue for some people. But from reading the research, it's not actually an issue for most people.
00:20:13
Speaker
And also coffee has so much more to offer. It has so many benefits. Most of the science is all about the positive effects of coffee.
Genetics and Coffee Consumption
00:20:23
Speaker
So we're the only ones really pushing our coffee to this degree and with this much testing to really sell our coffee on the positives.
00:20:36
Speaker
So yeah, it's a bit of a wacky idea, but I'm hoping that I've managed to pull it off. No, it's good. It's interesting to hear the level of, you know, you're clearly passionate about it. So we've gone to the level of detail that you have. I've got to ask this. Have you ever been a tea man or has it always been coffee?
00:20:53
Speaker
You know I'm actually sitting there drinking a cup or standing here drinking a cup of turmeric ginger and galangal tea so I like the herbal teas too.
00:21:08
Speaker
in the afternoon. I've got to admit I'm a brew, I'm a cup of tea first thing and then I'm a mid-morning coffee and a mid-afternoon coffee guy. That's my habit. Mid-afternoon and that doesn't keep you up at night, are you alright? I'm alright with that, yeah. I wish I could drink coffee into the afternoon.
00:21:31
Speaker
I want to go on and talk about how you recommend people using this foot for endurance sports, but I suppose that's a good question as well. Can you drink too much and is it not recommended to be drinking it in the afternoon?
00:21:45
Speaker
Well, so it is all down to your own unique genetic variability basically. So there's two different genes which code for your ability to metabolize caffeine and then also to absorb the caffeine.
00:22:02
Speaker
So it's your kind of unique combination of those two genes which dictate how you react to coffee and you kind of you know, we're all old enough now to know how we our own personal kind of reaction is to coffee without needing to test for the genes like I kind of I know that
00:22:20
Speaker
If I drink coffee in the afternoon, because I'm a slow metabolizer of caffeine, if I drink a coffee in the afternoon, it can stay with me for around eight hours and it can keep me up at night. Whereas it sounds like you're probably, you have the gene, which means you're a faster metabolizer of caffeine, which means you can drink it later on in the day. So it's really unique to you and your own gene set. Interesting stuff. Okay. So, so.
00:22:47
Speaker
How do you recommend people use this for running? It's for all endurance, isn't it? Running triathlon, cycling, et cetera. So say I'm running a marathon, or I'm going to take part in a race. Do I need one before and then should you be, like you see gels that people take with caffeine in them, for example, which I now know this is more than that. Do you need a bit more halfway? Go on, give me some examples of how it should be used for
00:23:17
Speaker
running hmm, so I guess I guess everybody knows that coffee is really Beneficial it kind of turns into a bit of a superhero when it comes to sports and because of the caffeine in coffee So if you if you have caffeine so caffeine is one of the few proven legally allowed ergogenic aids to sport which means that
00:23:42
Speaker
enhances your sports performance, right? So there's two meta-analyses which show increases exercise performance by around 11 to 12% on average. And that's the caffeine in coffee. So all coffee has caffeine. Our coffee, particularly high in polyphenol coffee,
00:24:01
Speaker
has the added benefits on your performance side that the polyphenols level out the effects of caffeine. So caffeine can give you a kind of a short kind of intense high of energy. Whereas polyphenols mean that that's a more sustained release of the energy or effects of the caffeine. So it's generally better for the more endurance kind of an hour or longer type events. You'll start to notice the difference.
00:24:30
Speaker
And then also the polyphenols because of their antioxidant and their anti-inflammatory effects, they're really good to support your recovery as well after exercise. So we recommend after a run, if you have a cup of coffee caffeinated or decaf, it'll help the antioxidants and the anti-inflammatory effects of them will speed up your recovery as well.
00:24:53
Speaker
yeah so on both sides basically but yeah as far as actually using it in a race so if I was to do a marathon tomorrow for example um the the international society of sports nutrition recommend three to six milligrams of caffeine per kilo of body weight which is quite a lot of coffee that's around three to six uh for me for my size um it's around three to six espressos
00:25:18
Speaker
Okay. So it's a lot of coffee. Yeah. And it takes around 30 to 90 minutes to metabolize that caffeine. So what I tend to do is around an hour before a race or have a double espresso or a small cafeteria, which gives me around 150 milligrams of caffeine.
00:25:35
Speaker
and then I've worked out for my own personal testing that around four milligrams of caffeine per kilo so around four espressos is the ideal for me so about an hour before I'll have a double espresso and then close to the race I'll top up with if I can another coffee but it's quite hard sometimes to drink that much coffee if you've got kind of pre-race nerves so I'll probably quite often have a couple of caffeine pills before the race
Perfecting Home Brewing
00:26:01
Speaker
um to top me up to around 300 milligrams of caffeine so which is what's recommended by the ISSN okay cool but yeah it's all very variable so you've got to don't test that out on a race day for the first time you know try it trying uh on a training day you don't any uh accidents uh or any
00:26:22
Speaker
Yeah, with the tummy drops, you don't want to test that out. You must be a bit of a connoisseur of making coffee and the reason I say this is I bought a lovely coffee machine for my birthday in December.
00:26:38
Speaker
And I am still rubbish, right, with, you know, the spout for doing the frothy milk. I just can't get the hang of it. And Lucy, my better half, is like, just put the spout just under the top of the milk, and she does anything, froths all up lovely, but I have a go, and it's up the wall. I can get the grip of it, can get the hang of it, so you'll have to...
00:27:02
Speaker
or get on YouTube, watch some videos. Or just strictly just sit with a double espresso. I mean, I got a Sage espresso machine on Black Friday, and I think it's literally changing my coffee making life. It's so fun. I've never was an espresso drinker before. I've got well into it. It's quite addictive, like learning how to make the perfect espresso. Yeah. Cool. Well,
00:27:28
Speaker
We've got three blogs out this week.
Exhale Coffee Offers and Conclusion
00:27:30
Speaker
I know there's lots of information on your website as well. So the lab reports from the science of this on your website. I know they are, aren't they? Yes, the full 15 page antioxidant lab test is written up on the website. So yeah, have a read of that. Have a strong coffee before you read it.
00:27:48
Speaker
So if anyone did, yeah, in reading the science bits, like Alex said, have a strong coffee. And actually, as Alex Manos likes to tell you, coffee actually supports your memory consolidation. So having that coffee before will help you be more likely to remember it as well. Apparently. Nice.
00:28:08
Speaker
We've also got a 40% discount code on, haven't we, as part of your supporting us at the moment, which is run14. That's 40% off your first bag of coffee. So if you want to try it, everybody, then do use code run40. We're sharing that through our social media channels at the moment as well. Alex, just remind us of your social handles and all that good stuff and your website address so that people can
00:28:38
Speaker
connect with you and get onto your shop as well.
00:28:43
Speaker
Yeah, so we're at www.exhale.coffee.com. And our Instagram is at your exhale. I think it's exhalecoffee. It's exhalecoffee, if I remember correctly. And the competition we're running this week. Make sure you all enter the competition as well, because there's, well, I love the prize up for grabs, isn't it? The coffee machine you've put on there. That's brilliant.
00:29:11
Speaker
Well exactly there you go, you should enter that mate because you could win a stage but not only that, as part of the prize, you get a one-on-one Zoom tutorial on how to use it so you've got to learn how to froth your belt, get entering.
00:29:29
Speaker
Alex, thanks for coming on. It's been great to chat. It's really interesting. And yeah, everybody make sure you use that Run 40 code if you want to try out Exhale Coffee. Cheers. Thanks for having me. Thanks for coming on. Cheers, mate.