This Coffee Could Actually Be Good For Your Digestion

All in all, recent years have been a pretty validating time for coffee-lovers. First, we found out that coffee may actually prevent premature death due to heart disease, Parkinson's, and diabetes. And now, some blessed souls have gone and made fermented coffee that could be good for your gut health. The heroes of the hour at Brooklyn-based coffee start-up Afineur have come up with the aptly named Culture Coffee, which promises to eliminate the digestion issues coffee can cause. According to the product description, Culture Coffee has undergone natural fermentation that makes it both healthy and a little more flavorful. Translation: If you take probiotics or drink fermented kombucha or tea to enhance your gut health, this might be the coffee for you. However, it's important to keep in mind that this isn't necessarily a probiotic coffee — Culture Coffee is fermented through a slightly different process than the probiotics found in foods like yogurt and sauerkraut. “It isn’t [technically] probiotic because the beans are shelf-stabilized,” Camille Delebecque, PhD, the CEO and co-founder of Afineur, told Well + Good. Though the coffee doesn't contain the "good" bacteria that makes foods like yogurt and kefir so healthy, it's fermented through a process that takes out the molecules that cause bitterness in coffee. “Besides being better for people with acid reflux, we’ve also seen that is better for people with IBS, since they can be sensitive to traditional coffee,” Dr. Delebecque told Well + Good. We should note that this coffee hasn't yet been proven to be better for you than your average cup of joe, but hey — we're willing to test it out. Afineur's Culture Coffee is available to order in the U.S.