Coffee, red wine, carbonated beverages, spicy food and, oh yes, chocolate: for 20 years, doctors have been recommending that heartburn sufferers cut much of the fun out of their diets. Not so fast, says Stanford gastroenterologist Lauren Gerson.

In a May issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, Gerson and two other School of Medicine physicians, Tonya Kaltenbach and Seth Crockett, published the results of their survey of 2,000 studies on heartburn. They found no evidence that any of the commonly recommended dietary restrictions reduce or eliminate heartburn. Gerson, MS ’99, says more research needs to be done. “It probably wouldn’t be that hard to recruit volunteers for a study of chocolate.”