More 60-Second Science Ever get a sour stomach after your
morning coffee? Well, you might end up switching to a dark
roast—because that coffee concoction may leave you with a
happier tummy. That's according to research presented at the
American Chemical Society meeting in San Francisco. [And to be
published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry,
http://bit.ly/cberXM] Some coffees are labeled "stomach
friendly," because they're steam treated to drive out caffeine
and other chemicals thought to cause gastrointestinal distress.
But food chemists [Veronika Somoza et al.] wanted to know
exactly which chemicals were behind the heartburn. So they took
extracts of two coffee blends—one light, one dark—and their
steam-treated counterparts. Each extract proved to be a unique
chemical mix, with different amounts of caffeine and other
compounds. When the researchers served these coffee extracts to
cultured human stomach cells, the cells jacked up acid
production. Except in the case of one extract, high in a c