Last week, specifically on Tuesday evening, as I walked leisurely around a shop, I over heard a male shopper asking a shop assistant on which shelf to find green coffee as he had searched without result.
“Green coffee?” repeated the shop assistant who was obviously hearing it for the first time. “Yes,” responded the shopper looking directly at the sales girl. Quickly striding to the shelf with the regular assorted roasted coffee beans, with the customer trailing behind her, the sales girl waved sweepingly at the shelf with different coffee brands announcing that “this is all the coffee we have.”
With disappointment and desperation clearly written on the man’s face, he insisted on seeing the shop manager.
‘Green coffee’, ‘Green tea’ seems to be the rave of the moment with health conscious people, especially consumers who believe it can help them lose weight. For the moment, it seems not readily available to the masses as it cannot be found in your everyday shop but some exclusive shops.
However many of the consumers who are seeking it do not know much about it or even how to get the whole benefits. Most of them are just interested because researchers are claiming that it can help reduce one’s waist line, and some friends have mentioned it.
These green-coloured beans are nothing but the coffee beans that are being used from centuries to prepare a refreshing drink. The brown or black-coloured coffee beans that are easily available at stores in your neighbourhood are the roasted beans while green coffee beans are the unroasted beans that retain their original colour.
Coffee beans are initially green in colour and hence known as green coffee beans. These beans are naturally blessed with many health-enriching and weight-reducing properties. According to studies, the main compounds responsible for weight loss are caffeine and chlorogenic acid. This green coffee benefits in the following ways:
*Caffeine boosts the metabolism of the person by 3% to 11%. The increased metabolism makes the calorie burning faster and restricts more fat formation.
*Though caffeine is also active compound in green coffee beans, the major weight loss takes place because of chlorogenic acid. When you consume carbohydrates, chlorogenic acid ensures that only some amount of carbohydrates get absorbed from your digestive tract. This further reduces insulin spikes and also lowers blood sugar levels. The consumption of chlorogenic acid would reduce the fat generation in the body as whatever you eat would get converted into low carbohydrate diet.
The studies carried out on rats also revealed that the consumption of green coffee beans apparently reduced the fat formation and brought down the deposition of fat around liver. Burning of fat also increases due to the active fat burning hormones.
As the above benefits of green coffee beans state, if you are looking for weight loss then it is one of the major natural remedies you can try.
Consuming the green coffee beans
Like the regular brown-coloured coffee beans that you may have often used, green coffee beans may also require brewing before use. You cannot just consume these beans directly as they are hard and may have certain substances that would require heating to be palatable. You can brew these beans into a drink but still very few people could really stick to that routine because –
*The taste would not match the regular coffee. It may have blend taste that may not attract many taste buds.
*The coffee making from green coffee beans is not that difficult but the process should be supervised and carried out in controlled conditions to maintain the level of chlorogenic acid, the vital weight loss compound present in green coffee beans.
However, to make it easier, many companies have introduced green coffee bean extract that holds the goodness of unroasted coffee beans and its consumption easy. The extract comes with pre-defined quantity of chlorogenic that makes its use easier and the results more effective.
Can drinking coffee be a better choice to green coffee bean extract?
Some might think that when the green coffee bean is in the initial form of the regular brown coffee, then why should one opt for the extract as drinking coffee would also have the same impact? This is not true! Green coffee beans may get converted to brown coffee beans on roasting but the chemical properties and health benefits are different for both these coffee types.
Green coffee beans are unroasted coffee beans that grow on coffee plant. When these beans are roasted for commercial purpose or to enhance its taste, the vital weight loss compound “chlorogenic acid” gets destroyed in the process. The coffee that is prepared after the roasting of beans have aroma and taste that may work to brew the drink but would lack on major health rich compounds.
This is the reason why drinking coffee will not help when you are looking for health benefits or weight loss. Caffeine content is also very high in roasted beans as each serving of coffee made out of roasted beans may contain 100mg of caffeine, which means you cannot consume it frequently during the day. The green coffee on other hand contains just 20mg of caffeine for same serving. You can have five servings of green coffee in order to get the same caffeine as regular coffee. Green coffee is therefore safe and consumed more in order to lose weight.
Green coffee beans have their own set of advantages that usually get lost on roasting. If you are a coffee lover, then enjoying an occasional cup of coffee may not harm but if you are really looking forward to have benefits then consuming the green coffee would be the best way.