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Caffeine’s Bad for You, But Why Use a Chemical to Remove It From Your Coffee?

Dr. Patricia Farrell
3 min readMar 28, 2024

Removing the caffeine from products like coffee has become a health choice for many, but how do they remove it? Do you know?

Photo by Milo Miloezger on Unsplash

Do you like your morning coffee spiced with a bit of paint thinner? Well, if you do, then decaf is the coffee for you.

Data obtained by the advocacy group Clean Label Project shows that practically all major U.S. coffee companies, including Dunkin’ Donuts and Starbucks, use methylene chloride, a consumer paint stripper that has since been outlawed. Methylene chloride binds to the caffeine from coffee beans and functions as a solvent to remove the caffeine from them. Paint solvents aren’t good for us, right?

There is no doubt that methylene chloride can cause death in workers exposed to it, but they would be placed in particularly dangerous situations in enclosed spaces and OSHA has guidelines about it.

The question posed now isn’t simply coffee, but decaf coffee, and it has now reached a point where it is receiving new attention from coffee lobbying

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Dr. Patricia Farrell
Dr. Patricia Farrell

Written by Dr. Patricia Farrell

Dr. Farrell is a psychologist, consultant, author, and member of SAG/AFTRA, interested in flash fiction writing (http://bitly.ws/S94e) and health.

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