The ROOT CAUSE of Acid Reflux & How To STOP IT! | Dr. Mark Hyman

The key is not to take these acid blocking drugs. The data is pretty strong on these. They can cause bacterial overgrowth in irritable bowel. So you trade one gut problem for another. Today we're talking about a really common problem, reflux, also known as heartburn, kind of a little 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 GERD or gastroesophageal reflux disease or heartburn basically affects 25 to 35% of the population. And acid blocking drugs Nexium, Pravastatin, Asaffects, Prilosec, Purple Pill, they're the third leading drug in terms of sales. cost 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. what would we do if we can't take these drugs? We have to look at the root causes. So let's let's 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, basically overeating, being overweight, your stomach gets pushed up by all the fat in your stomach and that big belly causes reflux. Stress, 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 down and things back up. so that's not good. Magnesium 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. 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 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 opposed to COVID, 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. 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 or when I have coffee I get reflux or whatever I'm doing is triggering it. Also, lifestyle, you know, 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, deglycyrrhizated 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, 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're going to have 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, 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 do celiac antibodies that you can get from LabCorp Quest, regular lab. Food sensitivities may be a factor. Gluten and dairy, there's My favorite lab is Cyrex and I use Cyrex four, 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 mal digesting 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 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 sort of 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 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, you know, symptoms are basically warning signs. They're not meant to be suppressed or meant to be investigated. And unfortunately, most of our health care 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. If you love that last video, you're gonna love the next one. Check it out here. 30 years ago, we were talking about the gut and the microbiome. We didn't use that word back then, but we were talking about gut health and dysbiosis. And now that word dysbiosis is really now in the traditional medical literature. And essentially.