The Dr. Hyman Show - How To Reverse Acid Reflux

Episode Date: November 11, 2022

This episode is brought to you by Paleovalley and Athletic Greens. Heartburn and reflux are major problems for so many people. At least 10 percent of Americans have episodes of heartburn every day and 44 percent have symptoms at least once a month. So why are we suffering from reflux? What is the cause? Is it something we are doing or something we are eating? Is there some other factor that’s driving this epidemic? In today’s episode of my series I’m calling Health Bites, I discuss simple actions you can take to uncover the root cause of your reflux, the problem with acid-blocking drugs, and more. This episode is brought to you by Paleovalley and Athletic Greens. Paleovalley is offering my listeners 15% off their entire first order. Just go to paleovalley.com/hyman to check out all their clean Paleo products and take advantage of this deal. AG1 contains 75 high-quality vitamins, minerals, whole-food sourced superfoods, probiotics, and adaptogens to support your entire body. Right now, when you purchase AG1 from Athletic Greens, you will receive 10 FREE travel packs with your first purchase by visiting athleticgreens.com/hyman. Here are more details from the episode (audio version / Apple Subscriber version): Common triggers of reflux (2:25 / 1:45)  Getting to the root cause of your reflux (8:11 / 5:18) Supplements that can help with reflux (9:31 / 6:36)  The problem with taking acid-blocking drugs (10:36 / 7:40)  Tests you can get done through your doctor (11:07 / 8:11)  Weaning off acid-blocking drugs (12:16 / 9:15) 

Coming up on this episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Reflex is common. It doesn't mean that there's something defective in human design. It means that we're doing the wrong things for our body and our bodies are rebelling. There are clues your body needs to actually do something different.

Your body is calling for your attention and symptoms are basically warning signs. They're not meant to be suppressed. They're meant to be investigated. Hey, everyone. It's Dr. Mark here. If you've been following me for a while, you know that I often talk about how eating organ meats is so good for your health.

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All you have to do is visit athleticgreens.com forward slash Hyman. Again, that's athleticgreens.com forward slash Hyman to take ownership over your health and pick up the ultimate daily nutritional insurance. Now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hey everybody, welcome to The Doctor's Pharmacy. I'm Dr. Mark Hyman. That's pharmacy, the NAFTA place for conversations that matter. And today I'm bringing you a new feature of The Doctor's Pharmacy podcast called Health Bites. To improve your health by taking small steps, you can have a big difference in the long term. And today we're talking about a really common problem, reflux,

also known as heartburn, kind of a more advanced version, but it's what we used to call heartburn. And it's a big problem. It affects about 10% of Americans who have this every day. That's like millions and millions, tens of millions of people. And 44%, almost half the population, have symptoms at least once a month. Now, overall reflux, and we call it GERD or gastroesophageal reflux disease or heartburn, basically affects 25% to 35% of the population. And acid-blocking drugs, Nexium, Prevacid, Asafix, Prilosec, Purple Pill, they're the third leading drug in terms of sales, class of drugs in terms of sales. What is a bad design flaw? Like we're humans just poorly designed and we are subject

to this condition because we're human or is there something we're doing that's causing it? And rather than just taking a drug to suppress stomach acid, which we desperately need to digest our food, to absorb minerals, to absorb B12, to digest protein. I mean, those drugs are super powerful and they shut off so many important digestive functions and they cause secondary problems, including irritable bowel, bloating, community acquired pneumonia, osteoporosis, B12 deficiency. I mean, the list goes on and on. These are not really safe drugs in the long term. They cause a lot of secondary downstream effects, and they're not side effects. They're just effects

we don't like. They're pretty consistent. So what would we do if we can't take these drugs? We have to look at the root causes. So let's get down into it. What are the big factors? Dietary factors are huge. So fried foods, spicy foods, citrus foods, tomato-based foods, processed foods, alcohol, caffeine, smoking, all drive reflux up. So if you're eating these foods, you might want to stop them and see if that has an impact. Although there may be other factors.

Eating before bed for sure will cause reflux. Eating with a full stomach that you're already full, you know, basically overeating. Being overweight and your stomach gets, you know, pushed up by all the fat in your stomach and that big belly causes reflux. Stress, you know, chronic stress inhibits your digestion. You do not want to be digesting your meal when you're running from a saber to tiger. So your gut shuts it down and things backed up. Um, so that's not good. Um, magnesium, uh, is really important. About 45% of Americans are low in magnesium or deficient or insufficient. Magnesium comes from eating beans and greens and a lot of things we don't eat, nuts and seeds. And we're deficient also because we do a lot of

things that cause deficiency or stress, which causes us to pee out magnesium. We drink a lot of caffeine, alcohol, sugar, all deplete magnesium. And that is needed to relax the sphincter in the lower part of your stomach to let the food go down. If it's not enough magnesium in your body, it'll stay contracted and the food will come up. Another big factor are food sensitivities. People don't often realize, but it could be gluten, dairy are the most common. I definitely get rid of those and see if it helps. Bad bugs, often bacterial overgrowth, bad bugs growing in your gut, yeast growing in your gut. We call it SIFO or SIBO, small intestinal fungal overgrowth or small intestinal bacterial overgrowth. Really can be a problem. If you eat a lot of sugar, processed foods,

if you're constipated, if you have motility issues, basically you can get this bacterial overgrowth and that causes more problems because the food doesn't move through. It ferments and you get gas and it's just a whole problem. There's also a bacteria that can cause this. It's known to cause ulcers called Helicobacter pylori, H. pylori, and it's really common. It's often not a huge problem for people, but if you have persistent reflux or have an ulcer, it's important to get tested and treated for it. We'll talk about how to test for things. So there's a lot of causes that have to do with what you eat.

And you want to focus on getting rid of those things that are driving it. There's a lot of stress factors, obviously bad lifestyle things like caffeine, alcohol, and smoking, bacterial issues in your gut, food sensitivities, all can drive reflux. And it's not just about taking a pill to shut off stomach acid. It's about fixing the underlying problem. So what are the things you can do? What are the ways you can actually see if any of these things are a big factor? Well, fix your diet. So get rid of foods that may be common triggers like spicy foods, citrus foods, tomato-based foods, fried foods.

Get rid of food sensitivities for a while. Gluten, dairy, as well as cupboard. But there may be other ones like eggs or certain things that can be a factor. The 10-day detox diet is a very good elimination diet that helps reset your system and heal your gut. It's often, we'll fix this in a minute. Get rid of things like alcohol, caffeine, nicotine, which all trigger reflux. So don't think about it as forever, but try it for a while and see, oh, geez, when I drink, I get reflux. When I have coffee, I get reflux or whatever I'm doing is triggering it. Also,

lifestyle. Make sure you don't eat two or three hours before bed. Digest your food. Don't feel stressed when you eat. Your body needs to be in a relaxed state to digest your food in order for the sphincters to relax, the food to go through, and everything to work. You can't be under stress. So I recommend people do something called the take five practice. Just take five breaths in, five breaths out. Just before you eat, it'll calm your nervous system. It'll activate the vagus nerve and relax all the sympathetic activation that often inhibits proper digestion. So what other things can you do? Well, there's certain supplements that can really help rather than taking medication.

So instead of using Tums or Rolaids or that kind of stuff, you can use licorice. Actually, something called DGL, deglycerized licorice, which you can chew two or three tablets before you eat. And that often can be really effective and before bed. Also, I use a combination of glutamine, which has been really well studied and used a lot in Japan and other countries, but not so much here for reflux. Glutamine is an important amino acid, but it helps as the fuel for the gut lining and it helps heal and soothe the gut. Aloe, also helpful licorice combination. So it's a glutamine-aloe-licorice combination. It's a powder, you know, a teaspoon, 10, 15 minutes before you eat can be very effective. Probiotics also can

be very helpful. Digestive enzymes help break down the food. Magnesium, also really important, relaxes the digestive system. And also you can add something called zinc carnosine. Carnosine is really important also in helping the digestive function. Zinc is important for activating your enzymes. So remember, the key is not to take these acid blocking drugs, which cause real problems. And the data is pretty strong on these. They can cause bacterial overgrowth and irritable bowel. So you trade one gut for another. They can cause pneumonia. They can cause B12 deficiency, zinc deficiency, other mineral deficiencies. They've been linked to osteoporosis. So short-term, fine, but long-term, not a good idea. The key is not taking a drug. It's finding the root

cause. So let's say you do all these lifestyle things. You change your diet. You do an elimination diet. You get rid of the fried and spicy foods. You take the magnesium. You relax. You take probiotics and do all this wonderful stuff that we just talked about. You get rid of alcohol, caffeine. What happens if you're still struggling? Well, you need to kind of dig deeper. I would encourage people to test for H. pylori. That can be a breath test. It can be a stool antigen test are the best ones. You want to check for gluten sensitivity. I use a panel called Cyrex 3, but you can also use celiac antibodies that you can get from LabCorp or Quest, regular lab. Food sensitivities may be a factor, gluten and dairy. And there's, my favorite lab is Cyrex and I use Cyrex 4, which is a cross-reactive panel against

gluten. Check your stool test, look at what's going on in your gut, look at digestive enzyme function, look at whether you're maldigesting foods, whether there's healthy bacteria or not, or you have bacterial overgrowth or fungal overgrowth, and then you've got to treat those things. So I actually wrote a whole textbook chapter on how to treat reflux using functional medicine. And it's one of the things we do the best at. So I encourage you to not be despairing and certainly don't think you need to take a drug

for the rest of your life to inhibit your stomach acid because while it can help in the short term, in the long term, it's a problem. And I would just add one caveat. Often if people are on these drugs and they want to come off them, you can do all these things that I mentioned, but even if you stop the drug, you're going to have problems. And here's why. We get something called this rebound acid production. So when you stop an acid blocking drug like Prilosec or Prevacid, your body will rebound and produce way more acid. So that'll make you think you need to take the drug. But the best way around this is to fix all the root causes that we just talked about and then slowly

taper the drug. So I would basically cut the dose in half and take it every other day, every third day. You can slowly wean off over a couple of weeks. And that often will really kind of mitigate a lot of the problems of getting off it. So reflux is common. It doesn't mean that there's something defective in human design. It means that we're doing the wrong things for our body and our bodies are rebelling. There are clues your body needs to actually do something different. Your body is calling for your attention and symptoms are basically warning signs. They're not meant to be suppressed. They're meant to be investigated. And unfortunately, most of our healthcare system is about just suppressing and shutting down things as opposed to optimizing and improving the function of things, which is

why we call it functional medicine. So this is really a powerful strategy for fixing reflux. It's one of those home runs in functional medicine. I love seeing patients with it who've been struggling for years because they get so much better. Be sure to share this podcast with your friends and family, subscribe to every year podcast, and we'll see you next time on the doctor's pharmacy hey everybody it's dr hyman thanks for tuning into the doctor's pharmacy i hope you're loving this podcast it's one of my favorite things to do and introduce to you all the experts that i know and i love and that i've learned so much from and i want to tell you about something else i'm doing which is called mark's picks it's my's my weekly newsletter. And in it, I share my favorite stuff

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drhyman.com forward slash pics p-i-c-k-s and sign up for the newsletter and I'll share with you my favorite stuff that I use to enhance my health and get healthier and better and live younger longer hi everyone I hope you enjoyed this week's episode. Just a reminder that this podcast is for educational purposes only. This podcast is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided on the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, seek out a qualified medical practitioner. If you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, you can visit ifm.org and search their find a practitioner

database. It's important that you have someone in your corner who's trained, who's a licensed healthcare practitioner, and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.