Acid reflux is an extremely common health problem, affecting as many as 50 percent of Americans. Other terms used for this condition are gastroesophageal-reflux disease or peptic-ulcer disease. Luckily, there are natural remedies for acid reflux.
The hallmark symptom of acid reflux is “heartburn” — a burning sensation behind your breastbone that sometimes travels up your throat. In some cases, this pain can be severe enough to be mistaken for a heart attack.
Conventionally, acid reflux is thought to be caused by excessive amounts of acid in your stomach, which is why acid-blocking drugs are typically prescribed or recommended.
This is a serious medical misconception that adversely affects hundreds of millions of people, as the problem usually results from having too little acid in your stomach.
What Causes Heartburn?
After food passes through your esophagus into your stomach, a muscular valve called the lower esophageal sphincter (LES) closes, preventing food or acid to move back up.
Acid reflux occurs when the LES relaxes inappropriately, allowing acid from your stomach to flow (reflux) backward into your esophagus. But it’s important to understand that acid reflux is not a disease caused by excessive acid production in your stomach; rather it’s a symptom more commonly related to:
- Hiatal hernia
- Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) infection (H. pylori bacteria is thought to affect more than half of the world’s population, and has been identified as a Group 1 carcinogen by the World Health Organization2)
While these two conditions are unrelated, many who have a hiatal hernia also have H. pylori, which cause a chronic low-level inflammation of your stomach lining that can result in an ulcer and associated symptoms. If you have a hiatal hernia, physical therapy on the area may work and many chiropractors are skilled in this adjustment.
The hypothesis that H. pylori infection is responsible, or at least a major factor, for producing the symptoms of acid reflux stems from the work done by Dr. Barry Marshall, an Australian physician, during the early 1980s.
Are You Suffering a Drug Side Effect?
Besides these underlying conditions, please beware that certain prescription and over-the-counter (OTC) medications can also cause heartburn. Common culprits include anxiety medications and antidepressants, , blood pressure medications, nitroglycerin, osteoporosis drugs, and pain relievers.
If your heartburn is caused by a medication you’re taking, the answer is, of course, to address what, when, and how you’re taking that drug. Please do not make the mistake of simply adding yet another drug to counteract this side effect. WebMD4offers a number of helpful tips for how to address drug-induced heartburn, such as:
- Avoid taking more than the recommended or prescribed dose
- Some medications are best taken on an empty stomach, while others are less likely to cause side effects like heartburn when taken with a meal. Check the label for instructions, or ask your doctor or pharmacist for advice on when and how to take your medication
- Ask your doctor or pharmacist to review ALL the medications and supplements you’re taking to see if one or more of them cause heartburn.
- Changing the dose or switching to another medication may be advisable to ease your heartburn. Some drugs may be available in cream form rather than a pill, which would be far less likely to cause heartburn
- Avoid laying down right after taking your medication
- Drink some ginger tea
Why Medications for Heartburn Can Do More Harm than Good
One of the most commonly prescribed drugs for heartburn and acid reflux are proton pump inhibitors, which are very effective at blocking acid production in your stomach.
While that may sound like an appropriate remedy, considering the fact that stomach acid is creeping up your esophagus, in most cases it’s actually the worst approach possible, as a major part of the problem is typically related to your stomach producing too little stomach acid.
There are more than 16,000 articles in the medical literature showing that suppressing stomach acid does not address the problem. It only temporarily treats the symptoms.
PPIs like Nexium, Prilosec, and Prevacid were originally designed to treat a very limited range of severe problems. According to Mitchell Katz, director of the San Francisco Department of Public Health, who wrote an editorial on this topic four years ago, proton pump inhibitors (PPIs) are only warranted for the treatment of:
- Bleeding ulcers
- Zollinger-Ellison syndrome (a rare condition that causes your stomach to produce excess acid)
- Severe acid reflux, where an endoscopy has confirmed that your esophagus is damaged
According to Katz, “about 60 to 70 percent of people taking these drugs have mild heartburn and shouldn’t be on them.” Part of the problem with PPIs is that when you suppress the amount of acid in your stomach, you decrease your body’s ability to kill the helicobacter bacteria. So if your heartburn is caused by an H. pylori infection, it actually makes your condition worse and perpetuates the problem. Besides that, reducing acid in your stomach diminishes your primary defense mechanism for food-borne infections, which will increase your risk of food poisoning. PPI drugs can also cause potentially serious side effects, including pneumonia, bone loss, hip fractures, and infection with Clostridium difficile (a harmful intestinal bacteria).
Warning: Proton Pump Inhibitors Tend to Cause Dependence
It’s also worth noting that you’ll also develop both tolerance and dependence on PPI drugs, so you should not stop taking proton pump inhibitors cold turkey. You need to wean yourself off them gradually or else you might experience a severe rebound of your symptoms. In some cases, the problem may end up being worse than before you started taking the medication.
Ideally, you’ll want to get a lower dose than you’re on now, and then gradually decrease your dose. Once you get down to the lowest dose of the proton pump inhibitor, you can start substituting with an over-the-counter H2 blocker like Tagamet, Cimetidine, Zantac, or Raniditine. Then gradually wean off the H2 blocker over the next several weeks.
While you wean yourself off these drugs (if you’re already on one), you’ll want to start implementing a lifestyle modification program that can eliminate this condition once and for all. Antibiotics can typically eradicate H. pylori, but there are many other effective strategies that can also work. Ideally, you’d want to try these first, as antibiotics will also kill off the beneficial bacteria in your gut, which can cause other health complications. Besides, H. pylori is growing increasingly resistant to antibiotics, making the availability of non-drug alternatives even more important.
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Your First Line of Treatment – Unprocessed Foods and Probiotics
Ultimately, the answer to heartburn and acid indigestion is to restore your natural gastric balance and function. Eating large amounts of processed foods and sugars is a surefire way to exacerbate acid reflux as it will upset the bacterial balance in your stomach and intestine. Instead, you’ll want to eat a lot of vegetables and other high-quality, ideally organic, unprocessed foods. Also, eliminate food triggers from your diet. Common culprits here include caffeine, alcohol, and nicotine products.
Next, you need to make sure you’re getting enough beneficial bacteria from your diet. This will help balance your bowel flora, which can help eliminate H. pylori bacteria naturally without resorting to antibiotics. It will also aid in proper digestion and assimilation of your food. Ideally, you’ll want to get your probiotics from fermented foods. If you aren’t eating fermented foods, you most likely need to supplement with a probiotic on a regular basis. Ideally, you’ll want to include a variety of cultured foods and beverages in your diet, as each food will inoculate your gut with a variety of different microorganisms. you can easily make at home include:
- Fermented vegetables
- Chutneys
- Cultured dairy, such as yoghurt, kefir, and sour cream
- Fish, such as mackerel and Swedish gravlax
- Addressing Low Acid Production
As mentioned earlier, heartburn is typically a sign of having too little stomach acid. To encourage your body to make sufficient amounts of hydrochloric acid (stomach acid), you’ll also want to make sure you’re consuming enough of the raw material on a regular basis.
High-quality sea salt (unprocessed salt), such as Himalayan salt, will not only provide you with the chloride your body needs to make hydrochloric acid, it also contains more than 80 trace minerals your body needs to perform optimally, biochemically. Sauerkraut or cabbage juice is also a strong—if not the strongest—stimulant for your body to produce stomach acid. Having a few teaspoons of cabbage juice before eating, or better yet, fermented cabbage juice from sauerkraut, will do wonders to improve your digestion.
Other Safe and Effective Strategies to Eliminate Heartburn and Acid Reflux
Besides addressing your day-to-day diet and optimizing your gut flora, a number of other strategies can also help you get your heartburn under control, sans medications. The following suggestions are drawn from a variety of sources, including EverydayRoots which lists 15 different natural remedies for heartburn; as well as research from the University of Maryland School of Medicine, the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and others.
