New Info on Unfiltered Coffees

We added a new tip to Nutrition Warnings on health issues with unfiltered coffee and feel that it is important enough to note it here on the blog, and thought that rather than link to it that we would just duplicate it all right here, as follows...

Since we have heard several times that there are "health issues" with unfiltered coffee, and since a friend recently stopped by with some home made French pressed coffee to impress us, we decided to finally check it out. The issues do appear to be widely recognized and even officially "documented" on some sites such as Intelihealth (altho we do not give a lot of credence to Intelihealth). Anyway, what we found is that French pressed coffee, or any pressed coffee such as expresso, or more specifically any coffee made without a paper filter (such as "boiled coffee", as in Turkish or Scandinavian with the grounds in the water) is purported to raise bad cholesterol levels. This is because without a filter the supposedly nefarious "diterpene" oils of cafestol and kahweol are not filtered out and go directly into the coffee, resulting in the stated negatives. Update: the contention that cafestrol and kahweol increase cholesterol is documented officially as correct by the National Institute of Health, which also noted that these oils are carcinogenic to some extent, as well as effective as a sunscreen! However, we are not yet verifying that coffee filters actually filter out these oils, but it appears that filtering does reduce them to "negligible amounts", and we assume that would depend upon the quality, thickness (we now use two filters at at time), and effectiveness of the filter(s). So, it might be OK to have an expresso once in a while, but it might be advisable to avoid making it a (bad) habit...