What harm does drinking instant coffee regularly do to your body?

When it comes to coffee, it is not only popular abroad, but also a very popular drink in our country, especially for white-collar workers who often stay up late to work overtime. It is very common for each person to have a cup of coffee. However, although freshly ground coffee is good, it is not suitable for the workplace with a very fast work pace, so instant coffee came into being, which can not only refresh the mind, but also improve one's work efficiency.

However, many people are worried about instant coffee: Will drinking instant coffee often cause harm to our body? Are there many additives in instant coffee that are bad for our body? In fact, instant coffee is not as terrible as we think. Instant coffee is made by extracting effective ingredients from roasted coffee beans and drying them into powder. It is usually made into three-in-one coffee drinks. The reason why it is criticized is that a lot of white sugar, non-dairy creamer and edible flavors are added to it.

The addition of sugar is one of the main causes of obesity, and it is also likely to cause related diseases such as high blood pressure and diabetes. Non-dairy creamer contains hydrogenated vegetable oil, and the trans fatty acids in hydrogenated vegetable oil are not good for our health, so we often mention that we should avoid excessive intake. Although three-in-one instant coffee is very delicious and can be easily accepted by people, the first coffee that ordinary people come into contact with is usually this kind of coffee, which has a unique taste but is particularly fragrant and sweet, and can quickly make people addicted!

But there are certain reasons why it tastes so good. Even without milk, it has a very mellow and smooth taste, thanks to non-dairy creamer (also called creamer). It is much sweeter and more delicious than the bitter and bland black coffee, mainly thanks to sugar! Non-dairy creamer contains a lot of saturated fat, which is the same as the fat in fat meat. It is high in calories and tastes good, but it is the number one enemy of a good figure and can easily cause weight gain. Therefore, if you consume a lot of instant coffee with non-dairy creamer added every day, you may consume more fat. As the saying goes: being fat ruins everything. It not only affects your appearance index, but may also increase your risk of cardiovascular disease!

Sugar is called the number one enemy that has destroyed our human health in the past 100 years - obesity, high blood lipids, high uric acid, skin aging, and vascular aging are all related to it! People who drink sugar water every day are more likely to have excessive visceral fat, and the health hazards may be greater than ordinary obesity! From the perspective of the nutritional composition of instant coffee, mainly based on the ingredient list of a certain instant coffee, a 15-gram three-in-one instant coffee has an energy of 291 kilojoules (about 70 kcal), 0.6 grams of protein, 2.4 grams of fat, 11.2 grams of carbohydrates, and 68 milligrams of sodium. This means that if you drink 3 cups of instant coffee a day, the energy intake may exceed one-tenth of the daily energy required, and both sugar and calories cannot be ignored.

Therefore, we do not recommend drinking a large amount of three-in-one instant coffee every day. It is okay to drink it once or twice occasionally, but if you develop a habit, the harm should not be underestimated! In addition, instant coffee inevitably involves caffeine. The caffeine in coffee will have a certain excitatory effect on the central nervous system of our brain, giving people a feeling of relieving fatigue and improving their own attention, so we often rely on drinking coffee to refresh ourselves. However, if you drink coffee excessively, it is likely to cause palpitations, insomnia, and unstable blood pressure, especially for some people who are sensitive to caffeine. If they experience discomfort such as accelerated heartbeat, nausea, and dizziness after drinking coffee, it can be said that coffee is a contradiction with both advantages and disadvantages.

Therefore, for those who drink coffee frequently, it is important to control the intake. Generally, it is best not to drink more than 3 cups a day (each cup is about 200 ml). If you can choose freshly ground pure coffee, try to drink less instant coffee. If you can only drink instant coffee, you need to pay attention to its energy and carbohydrates, and try to choose products with lower energy, carbohydrate and fat content. Finally, let's talk about non-dairy creamer and trans fatty acids: non-dairy creamer is an "amazing" invention, which allows poor people in the past to enjoy the taste of cream: in Western countries at that time, cream was expensive and relatively scarce, and it was definitely a product exclusively for the rich!

A clever chemist hydrogenated vegetable oil to obtain a butter-like product, which is very low in cost, easier to store, and not prone to spoilage, so it is widely used in food processing. However, with the continuous advancement of medical research, people have also discovered that the trans fatty acids in hydrogenated vegetable oils have terrible harm to the body's cardiovascular system, which is an important reason for the increase in blood lipids and the high incidence of thrombosis!

Therefore, the current food processing industry is committed to continuously reducing the content of trans fatty acids in hydrogenated vegetable oils. At present, although many foods are added with hydrogenated vegetable oils (cocoa butter substitute chocolate, some fried foods, coffee companion, etc.), their trans fatty acid content is marked as zero (my country stipulates that any fat content below 0.3% can be marked as zero content). However, vegetable cream products, fried foods, cocoa butter substitute chocolate products, various pies and other foods have a relatively high fat content and are likely to contain harmful trans fatty acids. It is better for everyone to eat less!

Source: NetEase/