Unfortunately, we live in a time where companies use fear to drive sales. Advertisements will use words that are not used in common conversation to create confusion. This is called fear-based marketing and it is easily identified. To avoid bashing any company in particular, here are some dated examples:
Mycotoxins are among the long list of words that are used to scare someone into buying a certain product. What are they?
Mycotoxins are naturally occurring fungi, rarely found living on green (pre-roasted) coffee beans.
Let's take a step back here and remember that fungus lives everywhere, including on and inside every human being. However, when not taken care of properly, this fungus can turn into mold.
This type of mold is painfully obvious when living on green coffee beans. Any specialty coffee roaster can identify mold living on their beans by measuring moisture levels. These moisture tests are done routinely, as moisture plays a large role in the selection/rejection processes of quality control. The studies that have been preformed about mycotoxins are incredible misleading, because they are done on unroasted coffee beans, which should never, ever be used to brew.
Raw, unroasted, green coffee beans have (arguably) redeeming qualities on their own, but are not to be used for brewing. So, while small amounts of mycotoxins may be found in unroasted coffee beans, up to 90% of it will be cooked off and killed during the roasting process.
This leaves hardly-detectable levels of mycotoxins from even the highest mycotoxin greens available. Conveniently, caffeine is a natural mycotoxin inhibitor (as are kahweol and cafestrol, both found naturally in coffee as well). Therefore, coffee with a higher content of caffeine will contain fewer mycotoxins. If you drink four cups of coffee a day, you'll average about 19-10ng of moycotoxins. To put that into perspective, that's 1000x less than what you'd get from eating 20g of Brazilian Peanuts (obviously non-toxic). Levels of mycotoxins in coffee and other common food items are so low that further research by the FDA has been discontinued.
