Is Light or Dark Roast Coffee Healthier?

When it comes to reducing body weight, dark roast coffee is more effective than light roast coffee. If you drink non-paper-filtered coffee, such as boiled, French press, or Turkish coffee, you should know that the amount of cholesterol-raising compounds in the lightest roast coffee beans may be twice as high as in very dark roast coffee beans, as you can see at 0:07 in my video Which Coffee Is Healthier: Light vs. Dark Roast. It appears some of the cholesterol-raising compounds are destroyed by roasting, so, in this case, darker is better. (Alternatively, as I described in Does Coffee Affect Cholesterol?, you can use a paper filter and eliminate 95 percent of the cholesterol-raising activity of coffee regardless of the roast.)

You may be familiar with another video of mine—Friday Favorite: Does Adding Milk Block the Benefits of Coffee?, which showed that dark roasting may also destroy up to nearly 90 percent of the chlorogenic acids, the antioxidant, anti-inflammatory phytonutrients purported to account for many of coffee’s benefits. In that case, light roast would be better, as you can see at 0:39 in my video. However, dark roasting can wipe out up to 99.8 percent of pesticides in conventionally grown coffee and more than 90 percent of a fungal contaminant called ochratoxin, a potent kidney toxin found “in a wide range of unprocessed and processed food including coffee”—foods that can get moldy.

Keep reading this article on NutritionFacts.org.