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Coffee: Effect On Digestive
Much of the action in the U.S. retail coffee wars of the last few years has been over the best-tasting brand. McDonald's and Dunkin' Donuts are battling Starbucks, not to mention Caribou Coffee, Peet's Coffee & Tea and numerous others. And Burger King offers a "turbo-strength" version.
But Folgers, whose cans of coffee have stood on U.S. supermarket shelves for decades, has opened a new flank in the war: a "stomach-friendly" coffee for people who think they can no longer handle the hard stuff.
Called "Simply Smooth," Folgers estimates that its market is the 35 million to 40 million Americans who say they have cut back on drinking coffee or eliminated it because it bothers their stomachs.
Simply Smooth, introduced last spring by Folgers' parent company, Procter & Gamble, is one of a growing number of "stomach-friendly" coffees now available. Other, smaller manufacturers are also offering easy-on-the- stomach coffees, including Gentle Java from Coffee Legends and Puroast Low Acid Coffee. And one coffee company in Germany has been marketing to the niche for decades.
"This is our target group - all these people that are on Tums or Nexium and say, 'I'd rather not have a cup of coffee because it hurts my stomach,'" said Christoph Tegtmeyer, export director for J.J. Darboven, a German company that is now test-marketing its Idee Kaffee in Texas, with plans to expand in the United States.
Coffee companies are not the only ones heading in that direction.
Orange juice - another product cited as a stomach irritant - has also been modified. In 2003, Tropicana introduced a low-acid orange juice to appease consumers with sensitive stomachs.
But even as the market for stomach- pleasing drinks grows, some prominent gastroenterologists question the premise that coffee causes stomach problems.
A recent study by Stanford University researchers found that there was little scientific evidence to support the idea that eliminating coffee - and several other foods and drinks - helps cure persistent heartburn.
"It's as much mythology as anything," said Dr. Joel Richter, chief of medicine at Temple University's School of Medicine in Philadelphia and past president of the American College of Gastroenterology. "The evidence that coffee is injurious to the stomach isn't there."
The Stanford study, which appeared in May in The Archives of Internal Medicine, evaluated published medical reports from 1975 to 2004 on heartburn.
The study found that there was no evidence that giving up tobacco, alcohol, coffee, spicy foods, citrus or chocolate helped decrease heartburn, known as gastroesophageal reflux disease, or GERD. Research on coffee's effect on the digestive system was contradictory, the study found. "The relationship between caffeine and coffee and GERD remains unclear," the study concluded.
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