What’s All That Coffee Doing to Your Gut?

It’s a real blessing that coffee is mostly good for us. This unique cocktail of bioactive compounds is an extremely popular beverage, and its health benefits range from mood-boosting to reducing mortality. (Of course, even if it were bad for our health, we’d probably drink it daily anyway.) Still, we don’t know that much about what habitual coffee drinking actually does to the gut.

And so, to find out, a team of nutritional scientists from the University of Copenhagen sent an electronic pill on a fantastic voyage through the digestive system of both coffee lovers and infrequent coffee drinkers. On its journey, the SmartPill® was busy measuring the temperature, pH levels, and intestinal contractions. The researchers also analyzed urine and stool samples from the participants, both to get a better measure of their coffee intake and to analyze their gut flora.

Read more: “How Coffee Affects Your Sex Hormone Levels”

They discovered that habitual coffee drinkers—that is, those who drank one to five cups on at least three days of the eight-day study period—had a greater diversity of microorganisms living in their guts compared to the infrequent coffee drinkers. Javaheads also had a markedly reduced pH level (or a more acidic environment) in their small intestines. “But perhaps more importantly, frequent coffee consumption appears to affect the physiology of the gut itself, in other words how the gut functions,” study author Francesca Bucci explained in a statement.

Specifically, they found that habitual coffee drinkers experienced more colon contractions. While this particular piece of data may seem like something you’ve uncovered independently through your daily morning experiments with the substance, it’s not so cut-and-dry. Transit time, or the time it took the SmartPill® to wind its way through the digestive tract, was similar for both groups. Basically, both trains ran on schedule, but the coffee track came with more jostling.

While the researchers say the pH findings are too preliminary to determine whether or not they’re good for us, the findings on gut contractions are more straightforward. “Contractions in the gut can support healthy digestion, help prevent constipation, and keep the intestinal muscles in good condition,” Bucci said.

The sample size for the study (especially the infrequent drinkers) was rather small, but the researchers stress it was more exploratory in nature. Additional research could open up new avenues of treatments for those who suffer from intestinal disorders. “If we can understand how coffee affects digestion and intestinal contractions, it may be possible to use that knowledge to stimulate gut motility in a natural way,” study author Henrik Munch Roager explained. “That would be extremely valuable.”

I’ll raise a mug to that.

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