Heartburn - 040

SPEAKER A The following program presents principles designed to promote good health and is not intended to take the place of personalised, professional care. The opinions and ideas expressed are those of the speakers. Viewers are encouraged to draw their own conclusions about the information presented. Welcome to healthy living. I'm your host, Margot Marshall. Do you suffer from heartburn and is it the same as a heart attack? How can it be relieved? Stay tuned. SPEAKER B Healthy Living is a production of 3ABN Australia television focusing on the health of the whole person, body, mind and spirit. You'll learn natural lifestyle principles with practical. SPEAKER A Health solutions for overall, good healthburn is painful and distressing. What can you do about it? Let's ask my guest, Dr. John Clark. Welcome John. What actually is heartburn? Is it the same as a heart attack? SPEAKER B A lot of people confuse them and there's been a number of rides to the hospital and an ambulance with that confusion. And it's always a difficult thing to sort the two out because heartburn, because it's in your chest, can be confused with a heart attack. Now they sort it out in the hospital by giving you things that would alleviate pain in your stomach and esophagus. And if it does, then they've made the diagnosis. But if they aren't able to leave the pain with things that they put in your esophagus and stomach, then they start looking for a heart attack. So it's hard to separate and that's why it is called heartburn. SPEAKER A So how would you actually know if you had heartburn? What are the symptoms? SPEAKER B Heartburn is often associated with a burning pain in the chest. One of the differences is that it usually doesn't go up to your chin or down your arm as a heart attack would. Oftentimes it's associated with eating. Most people who have heart, barn can tell you some of the foods they know have triggered it and realize that they probably aren't having a heart attack. But for those who maybe are experiencing it for the first time, they definitely want to sort out whether it is their heart or a problem with the digestive system. SPEAKER A So how is it usually treated when you go to the doctor? What would they usually do for heartburn? SPEAKER B Usually some medication in the vast majority of cases. And the medications will do things like shut down the acid in your stomach. That's a wonderful thing for reducing the pain caused by the acid. But that won't help you digest any protein because protein needs a very acid stomach to digest and so you might end up protein malnourished. SPEAKER A Well, that doesn't sound like a good idea. SPEAKER B No, not at all. SPEAKER A Surely there's a better way to do this and I'm sure that you have some better ways. Have you ever treated someone with heartburn? SPEAKER B Well, I had a lady, Helen, who came to me with heartburn. Her heartburn had been going for some time. One of the downsides to heartburn is that with this refluxing of acid up the esophagus. It can burn the bottom of the esophagus, and it makes ulcers in the bottom of the esophagus. We call it barrett's, after the name of the doctor who described it barrett's esophagus. And when this happens repeatedly and the esophagus keeps healing and healing and healing, it gets to where it doesn't know whether to heal or not. So it just heals just in case. And that's cells growing out of control. And we call that cancer. So it leads to cancer in the bottom of the esophagus. And so this lady had barrett's esophagus. She was worried that she would be heading toward cancer, and so she came to talk to me. How can I deal with this? So the first thing I like to do with these folks is try to educate them as to what causes it and also assess which one of the causes they might be participating in that is causing it. And so one of the big things that leads to heartburn and reflux disease, those are sort of in the same category in the same mechanism. And reflux disease is probably more of a medical term, and heartburn is more of a lay term. Okay, but reflux disease, or gastroesophageal reflux disease, as it's often called, that's a big mouthful. It's a big mouthful. Commonly happens when food comes from the stomach up to esophagus. Now, I suppose if we took everybody in this room and hung them upside down, we could probably get food coming down their esophagus. That said, it's important to realize that if you eat a huge meal before you lay down at night and put your esophagus on the level, you're going to be more likely to have reflux disease. So it's best to eat a meal no closer than 3 hours of going to bed and to eat things that will be sure to be digested by the time you go to bed. SPEAKER A That makes a lot of sense. SPEAKER B I'm not sure that fits into the traditional australian evening meal. No, but things that take a long time to digest are animal products. And animal products have a lot to do with reflux. For example, you eat a chunk of meat. Well, the meat is a piece of muscle off of an animal. It's their biceps muscle or their quadriceps or whatever. You've just taken a muscle off the cow or the pig or whatever, or the kangaroo, maybe. And when the body needs to digest that meat, meat or muscles is a bunch of fibers of actin and myosin all tied together like velcro. And it's very hard to undo that velcro. And so it takes a lot of acid. A lion has ten times as much acid as a human being. SPEAKER A Oh, my goodness. SPEAKER B It tells you what the lion might be supposed to eat versus the human being. Anyway, when the human being tries to put in that extra acid to unwrap that myosin and an actin of the muscles of this animal that they've eaten. It burns the stomach heartburn, it burns the esophagus heartburn. And so this meat causes this problem. The other thing about meat is that it takes a long time to digest. Whereas if you ate a pear, it'd be digested in a couple of hours. You eat a chunk of meat and you're going to look at 5 hours during the time that meat is sitting in the stomach that much longer, it's that many more times likely to have stuff come up the esophagus because of the time it spends in the stomach. And so you're looking at a large evening meal of meat and you go to bed, you can be sure you're probably going to have some heartburn. And you can either take the purple pill or whatever pill they give you, or you can start acting wisely, thinking about physiology and changing what you do. I tell people you don't like the way you are. Well, you are what you eat. If you don't like what you are, change what you eat and how you eat it and when you eat it. And so the evening meal is not going to be helpful. Another thing is how much you put in your stomach. Now, not to be graphic or too. SPEAKER A Disgusting, let's not be graphic. SPEAKER B If you have a sink and you put too much in the sink, it's going to overflow. And so you don't want to put too much in the sink. And so one of the things about overeating is you put too much in the stomach, it's going to overflow, it's going to come back up. SPEAKER A Okay? So essentially that's what it is. It's basically the stomach overflowing, regurgitating coming backwash. SPEAKER B And so what you want to do is tailor your eating to the size of your stomach. It's like one of these front loader washing machines. You could certainly stuff a lot of stuff in that washing machine until it was so packed that when it turned over, nothing tumbled. It was just one big lump of clothing. Well, that's what you do when you feel your stomach so full it can't turn the food. Its job is to work like the washing machine and turn the food and mix the digestive juices with it. If it's totally full to the point that it can't squeeze you're in trouble and people feel bloated and it comes refluxing back up and you end up with a heartburn and you're taking more antacid pills or whatever, you take a calcium antacid pill, guess what? Initially, calcium carbonate will calm the stomach because it's an antacid, but the calcium causes a rebound hyperacidity, so more acid will be produced. It's sort of a bad idea to take calcium pills when you have a problem with reflux. The other thing is the stuff refluxing is liquid. So if you're drinking with your meals, it's going to be coming up and refluxing, especially if you're drinking things with the meals that are already sort of sharp or acidity. Acid such as vinegar, wine, sodas, things that are very acid with your meals are going to increase the likelihood that you're going to burn the bottom of your esophagus, you're going to have heartburn, you're going to need to take a pill just to counteract your misdoings. SPEAKER A Oh, really? That makes so much sense. I love the way you explain these things and you think, oh, I can understand why that would happen. So it's a very good motivating thing to think. Yes, it would be sensible to eat earlier and eat less and not to have too much liquid. SPEAKER B Yes. Another aspect to this is people don't realize that the stomach needs a period of rest, eat and rest. It's good to have 5 hours between meals, so the stomach can finish its process and have a rest and then start the next process. A study of people who snacked showed that if somebody ate a breakfast and then didn't eat anything after that, the stomach would be clear and totally free of food and be well digested, even passing beyond the intestines or to the intestines in 5 hours. Then they took the same group of people, gave them the same breakfast, and they gave them a snack midmorning, either a couple of chocolate candies or a piece of pie with ice cream. The result was, excuse me, that they took 9 hours to digest the same food. In other words, the food sat in the stomach much longer. So you're sort of accomplishing the same thing as eating hard to digest foods. When you snack, the stomach has to stop, wait, it has to get everything to digest at the same level before it can move on. It's sort of like washing clothes in the washing machine. You put a load of clothes in and then you realize, oh, I didn't put my favorite pair of socks in. And so midway through the spin cycle, you open the door, you throw your socks in, not going to work. You have to redial it, start over again. That's what the stomach does. You put more food in, it redials and starts over again. And then you're going to have reflux because it's going to have a lot of stuff with it. And so this is a problem with eating between meals. SPEAKER A Yes. And that's promoted a lot by people who are supposed to know. And that's very influential. They do, they talk about eating between meals as being a good thing. And yet I think we talked about it in another program that the Bellock on Breslow study showed that people live longer and healthier. That was one of the factors and every one of the factors they had about seven was measurably important. And that was one of them not eating between meals. And that was goodness. That was many decades ago. That study, still highly respected study, you. SPEAKER B Think that will take some self control. Yes, indeed. People have to decide what they're going to do and stick with their decisions and make the decisions on good evidence. SPEAKER A That's right. And I think it's also important, if you're not going to eat between meals, to make sure you eat proper meals when you do eat them, so that you're thinking, oh, I'm not going to last. I didn't have any hardy anything for breakfast, I just won't last till lunchtime. SPEAKER B Another thing that will contribute to reflux disease for a couple of reasons is high fat foods, specifically and especially fried foods, or foods heated in the presence of oil. What happens is the oil coats the food if you're frying it like chips or something like that, or fried chicken or something. And what happens is when it goes into your stomach, acid is water based, oil doesn't mix with water. And so it's very hard for the digestive juices of the stomach to get at the actual food through the oil. I mean, the same thing happens when you put a lot of oily dressing on a salad. The body can't get at the salad to digest it because it's coated in a water impermeable layer. And so when they eat a high fat meal, the stomach has to make lots of acid to try to sort of saponify all those fats so it can get at the food. And in the process, it tends to fill the stomach with extra fluid and extra acid. And this can reflux. And so high oily diets are definitely going to be a part of the problem. And so it makes you wonder, we don't have any trees out there that have bottles of oils growing on them. It's not a natural product. It takes 13 years of corn to make one tablespoon of oil. And how would you eat 13 years of corn? But you could easily eat several tablespoons of oil. And so it's sort of a product that's dispersed in nature at the right levels, but we collect it. We make coconut oil and olive oil and corn oil and soybean oil. Since the industrial age, we seem to be able to make oil out of anything, and then we suffer the consequences of all this highly concentrated food. And reflux disease is one of those things. SPEAKER A Yes. If we could just leave foods pretty much in their natural state, we'd do a whole lot better than, yes, we sure would. SPEAKER B It's like God prepared it for us in that state and then we think we have to change it and to mess with it. And other things that don't help with the reflux disease are caffeine. Caffeine has several reasons why it's a problem. Let's take for example, if you drink coffee, when you drink coffee, you have all that extra liquid you're adding to the stomach that has the potential coming up. Caffeine itself makes it so that the valve at the top of the stomach is less likely to tighten up and close. So the valve is open, up comes the food. The other thing is caffeine irritates the stomach, creating a higher acid environment, makes the stomach produce more acid, becomes more acidic, and so caffeine is not going to help you. And the oils in coffee are very acidic as well. And they sort of increase the burn, increase the acid in the stomach, make it more likely that somebody's going to have heartburn when they use this. There's also other spices. Anything that's very spicy has the potential of making it worse. But especially pepper, both black pepper, which a lot of people use in a shaker, and red pepper, like cayenne pepper, they increase stomach acid. Black pepper raises stomach acid 400% and red pepper raises it 700%. SPEAKER A Wow. Some people actually promote the idea of the red pepper. SPEAKER B Yes. SPEAKER A It's supposed to be something really good to do. Not you're saying, no, not no. SPEAKER B We use it medicinally, especially topically, but when you're eating it, you have to be very careful. And societies and cultures where they eat more of these red peppers have more stomach cancer and esophageal cancer. What happens is with that high acid, it causes microbleeeding in the cells of the stomach, and that microbleeeding causes irritation. And then you have wounds, then those wounds end up healing and reforming and healing and reforming. And after a while, the cells just get so they don't know whether they stop growing or not. And they grow into cancer. And so it starts inflammation and then ulcers and then cancer is the usual progression. All from something that could be avoided through lifestyle changes. SPEAKER A Yes. And changing the taste buds, if you have actually got it. I can't take hot things myself. I remember once we were in a big buffet overseas somewhere and there was something in a bowl and I actually didn't know what it was. I thought it might have been mashed avocado, but I wasn't sure. And I thought I'd be just a little bit careful. So I just put a tiny bit on my plate and then I touched my finger on it, just like that. And with my finger, I just touched my tongue and I think I started dancing, actually, and crying out. It was just incredible. It was wasabi I'd never heard of this. I've never tasted, never ever want to have it again. I don't know how people can eat it. SPEAKER B It's incredibly hot, burning. So let's talk about how to avoid these are things I shared with Helen. We sort of had to talk her out of that evening meal, which she was very fond of. A lot of people are it's their social time. But one of the things that we especially promote is foods that keep the transit time quick and that's high fiber foods. Fresh fruits and vegetables, lots of fresh fruits and vegetables are very beneficial for reducing reflux disease. And it's because things keep moving on. Another thing is not to take any liquids with meals and not to eat liquid meals. What are liquid meals? Soups, porridges, juices, smoothies, green drinks, all these things where you're making liquid out of foods. And maybe sometime we'll do a program on the dangers of juicing, but that's a whole nother topic that we could cover. Another thing is to take small bites and chew them very well. Well chewed food digests more quickly and moves on. You actually get better nutrition out of well chewed food as opposed to food that isn't well chewed. SPEAKER A I could imagine it would digest more quickly because you've got the smaller, more access for the acid to get to each part of it. SPEAKER B Yes, to each part. And also the digestive enzymes added in. SPEAKER A The oral cavity from the saliva. SPEAKER B That's saliva, yes. And that said, you don't need anything other than saliva at your meal to wet your food. Even if your food is dry, the drier it is, the more saliva will be added to it. The best thing is to drink your liquids other times than at meals, and to only drink water really, because you wouldn't want to drink nutritional food between meals, because it'll just increase the likelihood of reflux. And so drinking water at least 2 hours after a meal and at least half hour before a meal. So you're not adding the liquid to the stomach to be reflexing up again. Another thing that's very important is to realize that your stomach runs on a clock. And it's sort of like your boss expects you to come to work at a certain time, and if you show up at a certain time, he'll have everything ready for you to go at your job. But if you're always showing up at some weird time, you can never be sure that your boss is ready for you, and your boss isn't sure that he can be ready for you. Same is true of your stomach. When you eat at the exact same time every day, then it's ready to digest, ready to move the food on. The digestion will be quick so that you don't have stuff sitting there ready to reflux. And so having a regular schedule. Good times to eat are like seven in the morning and one at noon or 01:00, so you have at least 5 hours between meals, in other words, between the end of breakfast and the beginning of lunch. And 6 hours is good too. You just don't do less. And when you do that, then if you're always eating at 07:00 in the morning, the stomach has the digestive enzymes all ready to go, the pancreas is putting out insulin to be ready for the blood sugar rise, everything's ready to go. You eat at the right time and the digestion is good. It doesn't sit there and form a ball of liquid and want to reflux. So scheduling is very important. And when we talk about the evening meal most of the time, it would be better to skip it. SPEAKER A Yes. This is a repeating theme with you, isn't it? And for all kinds of reasons today, it's in terms of reflux, but you've given lots of other reasons in other talks why it's a good idea to do that. So here's another reason. SPEAKER B Here's another reason. If you're trying to do that, one of the things to do is to drink a glass of cold water and take a walk. Don't sit there looking in the refrigerator saying, I'm going to do this. No, get away from the fridge and get out on a walk. And speaking of walking, walking immediately after meals is very effective at avoiding reflux. If you sit down and your stomach's very full, you just pushed on the stomach and things can come up. Whereas if you're out standing up straight and walking, you jiggle the food down, you help the digestion, you keep the blood flowing everywhere, you speed digestion and you reduce the likelihood of reflux and heartburn and pain in the esophagus. SPEAKER A And so Helen benefited greatly from all of this. This lady that came to see you, she actually had cancer, didn't she? SPEAKER B Well, she had the precursors of cancer there, yes. Barrett's esophagus. SPEAKER A And did she apply all this? SPEAKER B She did, and she came out with a good result and she was very happy and she got off her medication and so she felt better. A lot of those medications they give for reflux actually affect your brain. We're talking psychological effects that aren't good. SPEAKER A How much better to prevent the problem, like you're saying, than to take something that's not really doing a very good job and causing other side effects which you really don't want. SPEAKER B Really don't want this for sure. Some of them cause depression, and then you can be on a depression pill, and the depression pill causes obesity. And then you can be on an obesity pill and you get diabetes, and you can be on a diabetes pill, and pretty soon you're paying rent to the pharmaceutical industry and you wonder why you're on all these pills. And it all started with one pill. SPEAKER A How long did it take Helen to recover from the reflux? SPEAKER B I didn't see her for about six weeks or communicate with her. Most people, though, they'll get better within ten days. SPEAKER A That's pretty. SPEAKER B But in six weeks, she was reporting very happy results. SPEAKER A I think if you see a result coming up in about ten days, you think, yes, I'll be good, I'll be good for that long. And when you see the result, well, that's very a good incentive to keep going. Not as if you have to wait or something like that. So that was good. SPEAKER B And there's a few things you can do just to plain treat the pain and the reflux. And one of those is charcoal. Charcoal tablets, charcoal capsules. Charcoal from not from your barbecue, but from the pharmacist or the chemist, you can buy charcoal powder. And what charcoal does is it will coat ulcers both in the esophagus and the stomach and help them to heal. It will absorb toxins, inflammation. It reduces the inflammation in ulcers and in the stomach. SPEAKER A When would be a good time to take that? When you're eating or when you're not eating? SPEAKER B When you're having pain. SPEAKER A Oh, when you're having pain? SPEAKER B Yeah, when you're having the pain, take some of it. SPEAKER A Okay. SPEAKER B Or if you want, you can take it regularly. SPEAKER A How much would you take? SPEAKER B I would usually take three tablets or three capsules. Or if you're using the powder, put a teaspoon of the powder in a cup of water and drink it down. SPEAKER A Okay. Use a straw so it doesn't get all around your mouth and teeth. SPEAKER B You have the big black smile. People know what you've been up to. There's juices that are good, that are helpful, like aloe vera juice, taking medicinally it definitely soothes pain, helps heal the ulcers. It's a known natural remedy for reflux disease, and at least for the results of reflux disease. Pears are very soothing to the stomach. Bananas are very helpful. Carrots and carrot juice are very soothing to the cabbage. And cabbage juice are very soothing to the stomach. But sometimes just drinking something cool can be helpful. SPEAKER A Cool water just to relieve the pain? SPEAKER B Yes, just to relieve the pain. SPEAKER A That wouldn't necessarily like drinking cool water wouldn't fix the problem, but it would. SPEAKER B Soothe the soothe the pain, right? Yeah. Most of the fixes come by avoiding the things that are causing the issue. Some people wear too tight a belt around their waist, and they end up squeezing the food up, and so the food has no place to go down. And so you have reflux other people. If you eat food that doesn't have much fiber, the intestines fill up with low fiber foods. When they have low fiber foods and the intestines get all filled up, then that also is like a backup of things. And you're more likely to have a stomach that can't send food on down. And so you'll have reflux. SPEAKER A That'd be terrible, wouldn't it? To think the stomach wants to dispose of the meal and it's got nowhere to go. Is that what you're saying? SPEAKER B Yes, exactly. SPEAKER A This is not nice to think about. SPEAKER B It's like rush hour traffic. I can't drive forward, and I'm waiting for the next car ahead of me. Yes. Now, some people can tell you certain foods that especially irritate them. Some people can't deal with tomatoes, and it affects their risk of reflux. They're more likely to reflux a tomato. This is very individualistic. You can't say that there's one class of foods that are always worse than another, but you'd certainly be suspicious of things that are already acid or spicy. And so some people, if they eliminate foods, they can make a difference. Sometimes it takes eliminating everything and start adding things back. We call it the elimination diet. And as they add things back, if something starts the reflux going, then they know they need to avoid it. For some people where they are gluten sensitive, they'll discover that gluten will be a part of the problem. It'll cause them to bloat, it'll cause them to reflux, it'll cause them to have pain. And so they know to avoid that. Not everybody's like that, but there's getting to be more and more people who have that risk and so avoiding that risk can be very helpful. SPEAKER A Very good. Well, that's been a lovely lot of information and a lot of help for a problem who's very, very painful and very difficult to live with. So would you just like to recap a little bit on some of all. SPEAKER B The things that you've just yes, I'd be happy to. And regularity and schedule with your meals. So the stomach knows it's prepared to take care of the meal and it knows there's not going to be anything coming later and it can handle the food quickly and efficiently. SPEAKER A And that's seven days a week. SPEAKER B Seven days a week. Avoid overeating and especially avoid a large evening meal. Don't overstuff the stomach anytime and in the evening only eat foods that will digest quickly. Drink plenty of water between meals 2 hours after meal or a half hour before. And eat lots of high fiber fresh fruits and vegetables. And avoid the animal protein and high fat foods that are especially dangerous for creating reflux. SPEAKER A Thank you so much John. And if you'd like to watch our programs on demand, just go to our website, that's 3abnaustralia.org.au and click on the watch button. We'll see you next time. God bless. SPEAKER B You’ve been listening to a production of 3ABN Australia Television.