Why This Viral TikTok Has People Swearing Off Coffee
Some coffee has hints of chicory or chocolate, while other varieties may contain notes of caramel, toffee, almond, or raspberry. Others like to take their coffee with specialty flavors like hazelnut, French vanilla, or mocha. No matter how you like it, there is one ingredient pretty much all coffee has in common, according to NHS Dr. Karan Rajan, and you're probably not going to like it.
"Just so you know, if you drink coffee, you're also consuming cockroaches," Dr. Karan Rajan said in a video he posted to TikTok. The doctor, who is a surgeon for the National Health Service in London (via LinkedIn), went viral with this shocking new video, in which he alerted his three million followers that their daily cup of joe probably has a very unappetizing additive. "Pre-ground coffee, like you get in most stores, contains ground up cockroaches. Certain percentages of coffee beans become infested with cockroaches and other insects," he went on to say.
Coffee beans can contain up to 10 percent of "insect damage"
Dr. Rajan explained on TikTok that the bugs usually "can't be processed out completely. So they just get roasted and ground up with the coffee beans. Most food authorities allow a certain percentage of bug parts in our food." But it's not all bad news. "Cockroaches are high in protein," he joked.
It is an unsettling but true reality that insects, not excluding cockroaches, can be found in many food items, including coffee beans. Per the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, green coffee beans are only considered defective if 10 percent or more of the product is "insect-infested or insect-damaged." Any quantities less than 10 percent are not likely to be harmful to humans. This claim was backed up by Tom Saxon, founder of Batch Coffee, who told Mashed that when visiting a coffee farm that makes instant coffee, he witnessed beans "loaded with bugs, stones and twigs."
So the next time you pull into Starbucks or make your own brew at home, you can try not to think about what else may be lurking in your cup — or, you can take a more optimistic approach, like one of Dr. Rajan's followers, who simply joked: "Well I guess it's extra protein" (via Fox News).