Getting To The Heart…Of Heartburn | Health, Diet, Wellness & Weight Loss | JJ Virgin
– Are TUMS your favorite candy? Are you popping them like after-dinner mints? If you have heartburn, you know it’s miserable. It’s also super common, but chewing antacids all day long isn’t the answer and it could be making you worse, or at the very least it isn’t getting to the root cause of your pain. The good news is you can get rid of heartburn and enjoy eating again, but first, you have to figure out why you have it and treat the cause of it, not just keep masking the symptoms. Stick around and I’ll show you seven ways to do just that. (upbeat music) (scribbling) Hey, it’s JJ. Thanks for joining me. This is the place to be if you wanna get healthy, feel better, and lose weight, so like, and subscribe to make sure (mouse clicks) you don’t miss a thing. (bell chimes) So let’s talk about heartburn, which is a symptom of something called GERD.
It sounds pretty elegant, right? GERD. It stands for gastroesophageal reflux disease. Now heartburn happens when a valve in your esophagus doesn’t tighten fully or is weak, so stomach acid backs up in your esophagus as food moves from your mouth to your stomach. The acid leaking back up is the heartburn you feel, and man, it is not fun. Now, most people think heartburn’s caused by excess stomach acid, and it kind of makes sense, but that’s not always the case because you’re more likely to get heartburn as you age, but stomach acid decreases with age.
But there are some risk factors that everyone agrees on, like being overweight, smoking, and overeating. These will set you up for heartburn. So symptoms usually begin right after you eat and they can last for hours or disappear fast. You get that burning in your chest that most people know about, and you may also have a little sour taste in your mouth or you might even cough. You might also feel like you have food stuck in your throat, which can be a little bit terrifying. Now for a lot of people, it gets worse when they lie down or bend over because then stomach acid rolls right back into the esophagus. So when you have heartburn, I get why you want relief fast. The conventional treatment is a medication that gets rid of the symptoms by neutralizing or blocking that stomach acid. Unfortunately, what most people don’t realize is that these acid-blocking drugs aren’t safe long-term, so you have to kick that TUMS habit because it’s not fixing anything at all. It does the opposite of what you wanna be doing with your stomach acid, which means you could be making your heartburn worse.
Look, heartburn is so common. It’s way too common, honestly. More than half of adults say they’ve had heartburn, and we need to take it seriously. In 2004, GERD was the underlying cause of more than 1,000 deaths, and the rates of GERD as the direct or contributing cause of death increased by 115% between 1979 to 2004. It’s the most common digestive problem, and listen to this, In 2017, the US spent over 10 billion dollars to get rid of heartburn. Antacids and proton pump inhibitors for acid reflux are in the top 10 most prescribed medications in the world. So now you may wonder why the problem just keeps getting worse.
Well, it’s because we’ve been approaching heartburn and acid reflux all wrong. The good news is I’m gonna help you start healing with simple changes to your diet and lifestyle. Believe it or not, they can make a big impact on relieving acid reflux and heartburn. So to find out which specific ones will work for you, first you have to figure out why you have them. So let’s do it. Why do you have it? All right, number one, poor diet.
The most common cause is foods that are highly acidic or high in fat, like citrus fruits, tomatoes, onions, chocolate, coffee, and peppermint. Spicy foods or large meals can also cause it. And if you’re overeating, you’re putting on weight, and guess what? Excess weight pushes up against your stomach, causing that valve to spasm and let stomach acid spill out. So the first thing is you have to trade foods that hurt you for foods that heal you. When you cut out the foods that most likely are to trigger or aggravate your acid reflux, you give your stomach a chance to heal, and you do that by swapping those harmful foods with healing swaps. So trade your spicy noodles for some spaghetti squash, your spicy salsa for some hummus, your onions for ginger, your chocolate with vanilla and cinnamon, and just try to dial down the heat in general and exercise a little more restraint when it comes to portion size.
Now I always recommend you eat by the plate, ’cause honestly, it’s a no-brainer. It’s so healing and it will lower your sugar impact and it will save you from yourself. Everything is laid out for you, what foods, how much, all that. I’ll put a link below so you can get more info on how to do that. Also beware of some drinks, too. Drinks with caffeine will boost that acid in your stomach, and fizzy drinks can bloat your stomach, which might also lead to heartburn. And of course everyone’s favorite question, what about alcohol? I can’t give up my wine. Well, not great news here. Alcohol can relax that valve between your esophagus and stomach, which leads to acid escape. Now there are great options, though, of course, you can drink water. Some researchers believe heartburn is a sign of dehydration. You can also drink herbal teas and plant-based milks, but too much water during meals can dilute your stomach acid, which will make it hard for you to move food outta there, so go easy on liquid during meals and otherwise drink up.
Now, if you’re carrying a lot of extra weight, just know that being overweight is a strong risk factor for GERD symptoms. So if you’re trying to drop those pounds, when you eat by the plate, you’re gonna trade heartburn for fat burning because you’ll be focusing on a combination of lean protein, healthy fats, and fiber from slow, low carbs and loads of non-starchy veggies that will help you get healthy and drop the fat fast. Another change to your diet that’s super simple and will make a difference fast is drinking a loaded smoothie when you break your fast, which is preferably brunch, a little bit later than maybe first thing in the morning. It’s the perfect fuel because it’s packed with nutrients and it keeps you full for a long time, so it’s great at jump-starting weight loss, too. All right, now there’s number two, food intolerances. High food intolerances, I call them high-FI, and high sugar impact foods, high-SI, can cause inflammation, wreck your gut, and irritate your intestinal lining. When you’re sensitive to certain foods, especially things like gluten or dairy, they cause reactions that slow down your digestion, and when your body can’t digest food well, the food sits in your stomach and can’t pass through the rest of your GI tract, and that excess food in your stomach can cause acid reflux.
An article published in the September 2011 issue of “Diseases of the Esophagus” called out studies that show a gluten-free diet can control heartburn symptoms and keep them from coming back. Studies also show that reducing or eliminating high sugar impact foods can do the same thing. One even found that simple carbs might contribute more to acid reflux than coffee or bad fat in your diet. And you may not even be aware of how much sugar you’re eating, so you have to sleuth out where it’s sneaking into your diet, aggravating that acid reflux.
You wanna lower your sugar impact by making some healing swaps. My book, the “Sugar Impact Diet” is about this exactly, so check it out, because it will seriously help you cut down on high-sugar impact foods without experiencing cravings and withdrawal. All right, number three is not enough stomach acid. So let me bust a common myth about acid reflux and heartburn. We’ve been treating acid reflux and heartburn by lowering stomach acid, but research shows that more often than not, the real problem is too little stomach acid. And that makes perfect sense, and here’s why.
As we age, our stomach acid begins to decline. It starts to go down after the age of 20. And when you think about the fact that 65% of people using antacids are 45 and older, there’s just no evidence that too much acid is causing heartburn. We need a good amount of stomach acid to break down food, trigger digestive enzymes, and get rid of bacteria and other bad things in our food and water, so antacids could make your heartburn worse. Lowering stomach acid can also lead to vitamin deficiencies, osteoporosis, and lots of other things you don’t want to get. So you wanna add digestive enzymes to help break down protein and other foods better, and that should also help reduce heartburn, as well as gas and bloating. Now you can take those before you eat instead of the TUMS after you eat, and they’ll help you avoid acid buildup and the tummy upset. My digestive enzymes are called Belly Rescue – Safety Net Plus, and I’m gonna put a link to those two here Now, plant-based digestive enzymes also can deactivate some of the pepsin in our bodies, and that’s important because pepsin is a stomach enzyme that helps with digestion, but it’s also responsible for the upward surge of contents into the esophagus, so yeah, let’s prevent that.
All right, number four, number four, you knew I was gonna talk about it, stress. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you about all the bad things stress does to your body. You’ve probably felt it more often than you’d like to remember, and you probably know stress can hit your digestive tract and cause reflux. Research shows that people under stress are more likely to experience more intense acid reflux symptoms, and I will tell you, the first night that my son was in the hospital, part of a four-and-a-half-month stay where he nearly died, I still remember how bad the heartburn was that night.
So yeah, stress plays a huge role. Now, that doesn’t mean if you’re stressed, you’ll produce more stomach acid or that more shoots up your esophagus, but when you’re under stress, you’ll probably notice your symptoms more and say they feel more intense. Plus when you’re stressed, you eat like crap quite often and dive for sugary and high-fat fried foods, so make reducing your stress a priority. Do what you can. Take care of yourself by doing some things that relieve stress, like exercise or meditation, walks with your friends, and baths. You could do that with your friends too, all right? Whatever does it for you?
If you’re having trouble putting a dent in it, try a class to get you started, like a yoga class or a guided meditation class. It is super important to help this, to do this self-care. Now, number five night eating. Okay, this is such a big issue and it causes so many problems. In my experience, shutting down the kitchen after dinner is the single most important thing you can do to jumpstart all kinds of healing, from leveling your blood sugar to dropping body fat to reducing heartburn. When you eat late, not only you’re probably eating too much and it’s probably not salmon and Brussels sprouts, it’s probably things you shouldn’t be eating. Then you collapse on the couch and veg out, or worse yet, go straight to bed. Either way, you’re lying down, and that’s the worst thing you can do. So promise me this and promise yourself, you’re gonna stop eating at least three hours before bed, staying upright during that time.
Okay, number six. You’ve upset your microbiome. So you’re having heartburn. Then you pound your GI tract with antacids, but unfortunately, studies show that acid blockers reduce healthy bacteria in your gut and increase infection. Reducing the amount of acid in your stomach with antacids helps bad bacteria survive and get into your small intestines, so now you have gas and bloating and more of the heartburn you were trying to avoid in the first place. So take a probiotic to help heal your gut. Mine is called Microbiome Balance Probiotics, and it’s even more powerful than most straight-up probiotics. First, the prebiotics in it work in both the small and large intestines and don’t ferment, so they don’t make you gassy and bloated, which is what a lot of these things do.
And they help repopulate the healthy gut flora and support your gut function. But it does a lot more than that, too, because it has organisms called bacteriophages. These boost your immunity by attacking the bad microbes and supporting the good ones, so it’s like this two-for-one. Check it out. All right, even when you heal your gut, you also have to get stress, exercise, and sleep dialed in, because if they’re a wreck, they can also wreak havoc on your gut. And now finally, number seven, medication. So medications like aspirin or ibuprofen and some sedatives and blood pressure medications, too, can cause GERD. And then there’s the antacids we talked about, and honestly, a majority of people taking medication to reduce stomach acids shouldn’t be, and usually, those people can get rid of the heartburn with the things we’ve been talking about. So get to the root of your heartburn symptoms starting with what’s at the end of your fork, and let’s get you off those daily acid-blocking meds.
Don’t forget to hit like and subscribe and join me next time (mouse clicks) for the best ways to fill your plate (bell chimes) and feel better fast. See you soon.
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